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Copyright W 



CflPHSIGHT DEPOSm 



The University of Chicago Publications 
IN Religious Education 

EDITED BY 

ERNEST D. BURTON SHAILER MATHEWS 

THEODORE G. SOARES 



PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF RELIGIOUS 
EDUCATION 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
OF CITIZENSHIP 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 

KEW TOBK 



THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LOSDON AND KDCfBUBSH 

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, /TJKUOKA, SEKDAI 

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 

SHASSHAI 



rhe CHURCH SCHOOL 
OF CITIZENSHIP 



By 



Allan Hoben 



A&iociate Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Duties 
The Uni'versity of Chicago 




THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



¥''' 







<xJ? 



Copyright 1918 By 
The University of Chicago 



All Rights Reserved 



Published Aug\ist 191 8 



AUG 26 (918 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 



©CLA501551 



GENERAL PREFACE 

The progress in religious education in the last few 
years has been highly encouraging. The subject 
has attained something of a status as a scientific 
study, and significant investigative and experimen- 
tal work has been done. More than that, trained 
men and women in increasing numbers have been 
devoting themselves to the endeavor to work out 
in churches and Sunday schools the practical prob- 
lems of organization and method. 

It would seem that the time has come to pre- 
sent to the large body of workers in the field 
of religious education some of the results of the 
studies and practice of those who have attained 
a measure of educational success. With this end 
in view the present series of books on ^ Principles 
and Methods of Rehgious Education" has been 
undertaken. 

It is intended that these books, while thoroughly 
scientific in character, shall be at the same time 
popular in presentation, so that they may be avail- 
able to Sunday-school and church workers every- 
where. The endeavor is definitely made to take 
into account the small school with meager equip- 
ment, as well as to hold before the larger schools 
the ideals of equipment and training. 

vii 



viii General Preface 

The series is planned to meet as far as possible all 
the problems that arise in the conduct of the educa- 
tional work of the church. While the Sunday 
school, therefore, is considered as the basal organi- 
zation for this purpose, the wider educational work 
of the pastor himself and that of the various other 
church organizations receive due consideration as 
parts of a unified system of education in morals 

and religion. 

The Editors 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 


Foreword 


I 


CHAPTER 




I. The Demand 


c^ 


II. Civic Training for Childhood . . . 



21 


III. Civic Training for Early Adolescence . 


. 53 


IV. Civic Training for Later Adolescence . 


. 85 


V. Civics in the Rural Church School 


. I03 



VI. Adults in the Church School of Citizenship 130 
Index , 175 



IX 



FOREWORD 

This book aims to assist the awakened national 
spirit to a forward step in religious education. The 
Christian objectives of citizenship are presented as 
implicit in the gospel and conducive to the highest 
personal attainment in religious experience. Sug- 
gestive, but not formal, programs are offered for 
use in the church school. Attention is given both 
to the formation of right civic attitudes and to the 
expressional use of the information imparted and 
the attitudes induced. It is taken for granted that 
the biblical content of the church-school curriculum 
will not be curtailed by this venture, but that 
pertinent selections will be used and that the repe- 
tition, which at present is considerable, will be 
reduced in order to provide greater opportunity for 
training in the appHcation of Christianity to social 
behavior. 

It is evident that if civics is to find a larger place 
in religious education the teaching forces of the 
churches will need due preparation. Therefore 
this book is written in the hope that it may be 
used as a text in teacher-training classes, in mid- 
week meetings of the church, and by thoughtful 
parents. We take it that the numerous community 



2 The Church School of Citizenship 

training schools organized for the improvement of 
rehgious education are by their very name friendly 
to the citizenship idea and are convinced that the 
church school must not allow the present crisis 
for democracy to pass without registering wiser 
methods and deeper devotion in public service. 

The author is not proposing to write about the 
Great War, although of necessity it colors and 
stimulates one's message. It is rather in the spirit 
of the following utterance of Mr. Franklin K. Lane, 
Secretary of the Interior, that the elements of good 
citizenship are offered for the consideration of 
church people: 

Yesterday the Congress spoke a word which will open 
the door of Alaska, but a mother in Michigan worked from 
sunrise until far into the night to give her boy an education. 
She too is making the flag. Yesterday we made a new law 
to prevent financial panics; yesterday, no doubt, a school 
teacher in Ohio taught his first letters to a boy who will 
write a song that will give cheer to the millions of our race. 
We are all making the flag. The work that we do is the 
making of the real flag. 

/ am not the flag, not at all. I am hut its shadow. 

I am whatever you make me, nothing more. 

I am your belief in yourself y your dream of what a people 
may become. 

I live a changing life, a life of moods and passions, of heart- 
breaks and tired muscles. 

Sometimes I am strong with pride, when men do an honest 
work, fitting the rails together truly. 

Sometimes I droop, for then purpose has gone from men 
and cynically I play the coward. 



Foreword 3 

Sometimes I am loud, garish, and full of that ego that 
blasts judgment. 

But always I am all that you hope to be and have the courage 
to try for, 

I am song and fear, struggle and panic, and ennobling 
hope. 

I am the day^s work of the weakest man and the largest 
dream of the most daring. 

I am the clutch of an idea and the reasoned purpose of 
resolution. 

I am no more than what you believe me to be and I am all 
that you believe I can be. 

I am what you make me, nothing more. 

I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol 
of yourself , the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes 
this nation. My stars and my stripes are your dreams and 
your labors. They are bright with cheer, brilliant with courage, 
firm with faith, because you have made them so out of your 
hearts, for you are the makers of the flag and it is well that you 
glory in the making.'^ 

^ From the Chicago Herald, June 15, 19 14. 



CHAPTER I 
THE DEMAND 

An urgent civic duty confronts the American 
church. The hour has struck when inertia or 
evasion is treasonable. Democracy is part and 
parcel of Christianity. The values which Jesus 
Christ placed upon every child of man have now 
been so widely heralded and so fully attested as the 
basis of human welfare that every form of autocracy 
has become, in and of itself, immoral. At the 
point of the sword in the hand of ruthless tyranny 
the nation has rediscovered her soul and found 
it to be at one with the struggling freemen of 
the whole earth. At the same time the church, 
grateful for the full freedom which in this land 
the state has both granted and guarded, comes 
up to the help of the Lord against the mighty, 
and in so doing deviates not at all from her 
divine mission. 

Faith in the right as touching foreign or domestic 
problems does not mean a let-alone policy, as if 
God would miraculously intervene in support of 
justice in either case, but on the contrary the 
heartiest mobiKzation of power in support of 
right which in the long run attracts, creates, and 



6 The Church School of Citizenship 

consolidates its forces more effectively than evil. 
To clarify the import of democracy as Christian 
ethics and to Christianize patriotism for national 
and world service is an educational task and as such 
can be most hopefully undertaken with children and 
young people. Moreover the nature of the task 
is so distinctly moral and religious that the church 
school is obligated to attempt it. Possibly there 
is also a certain advantage making for unbiased 
and supernational treatment in the fact that the 
church has no economic ax to grind and is clearly 
dedicated to world-redemption. 

Usually as men work back to ultimates, whether 
in personal or in national crises, they come into 
the area where the church illumines, unil&es, and 
energizes action. The mobihzation of the hearts 
of men in what is right, whether for foreign policy 
or in domestic reform, constitutes a mighty service 
to humanity. '^Thrice is he armed that hath his 
quarrel just." God, whose will is expressed in the 
fundamental and historic ideals of this nation as 
also in the gospel of his Son, lays upon both church 
and state the common duty of realizing the King- 
dom of God. Taken alone, neither is sufficient for 
the task. The church's plea for righteousness 
remains an indoor doctrine of the few until the 
civil power accepts and applies it in law and usage. 
The principle of brotherly love developed and 
tested within the church group awaits larger 



The Demand 7 

demonstration in the wider field of national and 
international affairs. 

Democracy must fully accept and practice the 
Christian ethic or fail. Blind optimism will not 
save it, nor will wealth, nor ^'efi&ciency/' nor 
brute strength. Only Christ's way of life can last. 
Men by nature must discard, gradually or violently, 
every inferior scheme of collective living until they 
reach righteous and automatic peace in the Golden 
Rule. The church, being pre-eminently the cus- 
todian and propagandist of this faith, carries a 
corresponding liability to render this superlative 
service to the state. 

This duty, however, is very different from the 
trite practices by which an enslaved and state- 
owned church renders the citizenship more sub- 
servient and pliant in the hands of usurping rulers. 
In a democracy the citizens themselves are the 
state, and those to whom power is delegated are 
but the servants of the people. Hence good 
citizenship is not the surrender of good judgment 
to any ruler, permanent or temporary, but rather 
the intelligent consideration of public questions 
together with moral courage to insist upon righteous 
public policy. Whatever conditions or beliefs 
may have forced the early Christians, or any 
subsequent generation of them, to eschew the 
politics of temporal kingdoms and to hope for 
heavenly compensation or for the miraculous end 



8 The Church School of Citizenship 

of the age, the situation in democracy today 
demands, not withdrawal, separatism, or heavenly 
restitution for earthly injustice, but rather full 
and sacrificial devotion to realizing the ideals of 
Jesus Christ in organic social life. 

The demand that the church should relate her 
adherents effectively to the all-inclusive organiza- 
tion, government, seems altogether reasonable. 
Already the curricula of Sunday schools, young 
people's societies, organized classes, and men's 
brotherhoods include the application of Christian 
ethics to home, school, vocation, charity and relief, 
temperance, health, and allied subjects, so that the 
educational forces of the church are ready for a 
synthesis of certain of these subjects and the addi- 
tion of others to form a course on citizenship. 

It should be noted also that such an effort is 
most timely in view of the revived national spirit 
which without Christian direction may settle into 
the hard rut of exclusive nationalism, and also in 
view of the demand of thoroughgoing democracy 
that the efforts of people of good-will may graduate 
from the old aristocracy of doles and charity to the 
finer practice of social justice. In other words, 
the church school of citizenship should Christianize 
patriotism and democratize amxclioration. 

One of the great social transitions of the time 
is that from philanthropy to civics, and just as 
the church has been an inspiring and guiding power 



The Demand 9 

under the old order, which was acceptable before 
the democratic conscience was achieved, so now 
should she perform a similar service for the chan- 
ging social order. Through the long centuries 
while the emphasis was on ambulance service she 
did magnificently well, and in the new order, which 
calls for the abolition by civil process of the pre- 
ventable evils whose results demanded so fine an 
exercise of mercy, she should deliberately plan 
to be correspondingly effective. The same love, 
heroism, and sacrifice heretofore devoted so largely 
to mercy and relief must be chiefly devoted to 
training and exercising a citizenship which by its 
clear perception of justice and its tenacious demand 
for Christian standards will gradually Christianize 
all public relationships. 

For the sake of those who fear that so ambitious 
a plan may divert attention from personal piety 
and, on the whole, prove a net loss by denaturing 
the gospel's moral imperative for the individual, 
certain reassuring facts should be called to mind. 
In the first place, the magnitude of the campaign 
calls the recruit to utter devotion in a spiritual 
relationship to Jesus by which he is at once and 
forever enlisted against unrighteousness whether 
within himself or in the world about. He who will 
take up his cross and follow Jesus in the struggle 
to establish fully the Kingdom of God in the earth 
must seek complete inward fitness as God's gift 



lo The Church School of Citizenship 

to him for this holy use. The piety which consists 
in being mustered out of the World's fray is less 
Christlike than this. 

In the second place, it is well to remember that 
social or political action turns upon the conviction, 
integrity, and ability of individuals. Shaftesbury, 
Gladstone, Lincoln, prove this, but not they alone. 
Every question coming into council or going abroad 
for verdict by the electorate is subject to a series 
of conscious decisions in which right and wrong 
are the great categories. The Christian in coimcil 
or polling-booth, on board of directors or trade- 
union committee, may and often does decide the 
issue. What would Christ desire for the housing, 
health, and opportunity of the community's 
children? From that public policy he cannot 
swerve. Whither does His spirit lead in this reform 
of temperance or in this perennial issue between 
property and life ? If the direction can be known 
one's vote is determined. So of the board of 
directors wavering between profits and human 
rights and the labor committee oscillating between 
class vengeance and public good — in every case 
the decision of the big questions of public, financial, 
or industrial policy comes home to the individual 
to throw his weight for or against Christ. Surely 
the church cannot refrain from definitely preparing 
her youth and, in so far as is possible, her adults 
also fgr intelligent and uncompromising Christian 



The Demand ii 

action in all such important situations. The 
change that is coming over individual piety is not 
deterioration but application. God is more des- 
perately needed by one who exposes himself to the 
issues and hazards of active citizenship. 

If the forces of Christ do not stand true, wrong 
may become the established policy, and in place 
of the church Christianizing the community the 
community paganizes the church. The opposing 
forces through all the ages are in contact over a 
front as wide as human affairs, and to crucify 
Christ afresh is to lend one's influence to that 
power of unrighteousness which nailed him to the 
cross. It is equally criminal if, having power and 
knowing the issue, we stand aside or desert, allowing 
unrighteousness to have its way. For a Christian 
to neglect citizenship is to do that very thing. 

A third reassuring fact for those who fear the 
loss of piety in the melee of public life and ac- 
tive citizenship is that this venture widens one's 
opportunity to serve the Master. The standard 
inner duties of the church cannot enlist the services 
of any large portion of the membership, and the 
more important of these duties are intrusted to 
those who are professionally trained. Noticeably 
in recent years an increasing number of the more 
energetic and socially minded, among women as 
well as men, have been relinquishing their more 
devotional and passive roles within the church 



12 The Church School of Citizenship 

to engage in civic reforms of large dimension and 
of concrete significance. This high-minded and 
aggressive service is not yet correlated with church 
Hfe, and unless the exodus is to continue with more 
loss to the church and an unnecessary feeling of 
estrangement on the part of these vigorous, prag- 
matic people it will be necessary to incorporate in an 
orderly way the social civic element and import of 
the gospel, so that, through teaching, through com- 
mittees, delegates, and reports, and by meetings, 
exhibits, conventions, and what not, the full impulse 
for righteousness may get accredited expression. 

When one thinks what this might mean for 
Sunday-school classes, brotherhoods, women's and 
young people's societies, forums, and midweek 
meetings, the possibiKty of enriching and validating 
church life by the strenuous and the concrete quite 
overbalance the obvious dangers of secularism, 
misjudgment, and partisan strife within the church. 
Good sense and the atmosphere of brotherly love 
will rather lift the concerns of public life, not only 
to a plane of frank and earnest canvass, but to the 
level of prayer, as if the compassion of Christ 
beholding the multitude as sheep without a 
shepherd were again ours, moving us to lay before 
God the baflling needs of our common organic 
life. The devotional quite as much as the mental 
worth of civic problems awaits development within 
the church. 



The Demand 13 

It also follows that by this means ^^ being good/' 
which for some church members amounts merely 
to avoiding personal scandal, might be more 
generally translated into ^^ being good for some- 
thing." Such an experience constitutes a real 
accession of virtue; and the consciousness of 
having served in some capacity for the good of all 
the people is a real bond binding one to his Lord. 
The discharge of civic duty in this spirit stimulates 
genuine piety in yet another way. Many pro- 
fessing Christians are laggards who have almost 
lost sight of Christ. The high-tension words of his 
unsparing demand of discipleship no longer mean 
anything. They have been dulled by frequent use 
or blunted against the set habit of inaction. But 
when one comes face to face with the antichrist of 
mammon in public affairs, when one sees the pitiful 
toll of misgovernment, then the nature of sin is laid 
bare and the dynamic of a fighting faith enters 
one's blood. 

When such conditions are never faced and 
collective sin is never realized the corresponding 
repentance which leads to more Christlike character 
is also forfeited. The indictment of many a sub- 
Christian church might well be expressed in the 
ancient word, 

Israel dotji not know 

My people doth not consider. 



14 The Church School of Citizenship 

It is also a law of personal piety that one cries out 
to God as the burdens and moral responsibilities to 
which he is committed are perceived to have pro- 
portions going infinitely beyond his unaided human 
strength. Has not this been the sainthood of the 
noblest souls, from prostrate prophets beholding 
their country's need to that apostle who would 
redeem the Roman world, and on to Cromwell, 
Lincoln, and the Moses of our time — Booker T. 
Washington? If the church seeks a great and 
valid piety let her wrestle in the world-darkness till 
the break of day, and in the very injury of the 
struggle find God anew. 

At the present time most churches are meeting a 
better response from children and adults than they 
are from youth. The need of a piety that shall 
satisfy the idealistic and campaigning qualities 
of young people is very generally acknowledged. 
The docility of children and the quietism of the 
mature or senescent receive relatively adequate 
recognition. But there is something very holy 
and potent which too seldom hears the bugle call 
that mobilizes manhood for the Kingdom of God. 
May it not be that the latent devotion of that great 
host just coming over the crest into man's estate 
needs but to see the active battle line where evil and 
righteousness surge back and forth in formal and 
mighty combat in order to take on the full armor 
of God and to fight the good fight of faith ? There 
can be no knightliness without a cause, and if by 



The Demand 15 

adopting education for citizenship as part of her 
task the church can consecrate to the Kingdom of 
God young men and women who might otherwise 
settle into the spiritual provincialism of ordinary 
self-interest she will have improved her ministry to 
their souls and to society. 

Possibly no further plea for the general idea of 
the church school of citizenship is needed in order 
to give it fair trial in the field of religious education. 
It, is only to assure those who are properly jealous 
for the personal virtues which are inseparable from 
Christian living that the attempt has been made 
to show that these may be enhanced and motivated 
by acquaintance with, and participation in, the 
problems of society's organic life. Beyond this 
maintenance of historic personal piety it is very 
probable that a canvass of opinion outside the 
church would reveal a definite conviction among the 
struggling classes of society to the effect that all 
such piety is suspected until the hands that have 
been kept clean lay hold of the soiled and broken 
hopes which try to pull themselves together in the 
one inclusive effort of civil government. This 
skepticism on the part of the imchurched popula- 
tion, which is 60 per cent of the whole, may rightly 
be considered a demand for the civic and social 
application of Christianity. 

But a still more important demand will be 
found in the character of the problems which 
confront the republic. The marked trend toward 



1 6 The Church School of Citizenship 

public control of activities formerly held to be the 
exclusive concerns of private persons or corpora- 
tions is imposing an increasing burden on educa- 
tional agencies. Greater intelligence on public 
questions and higher civic morality become 
necessary as this governmental area widens. The 
public schools can hardly be expected to meet even 
the intellectual needs in a time when every shortage 
either of home, playground, diet, or trade is laid 
at their doors, and at best the moral and religious 
appeals and values of public questions cannot be 
adequately handled in the schoolroom. This 
situation offers the church an opportunity to 
supplement the school and possibly to pioneer in a 
neglected field; while the religious and moral 
phases of the subject are legitimately hers by 
virtue of a division of labor now well established. 
Good citizenship will not be realized until very 
much of the crude individualism now masquerading 
under '^efficiency'' and indentured to unmitigated 
self-interest is transformed by the service ideal of 
Christianity. To bring the civic interest under 
church tutelage would promote this end. 

Similarly in the popular repudiation of feudal 
conceptions of philanthropy there may be a net 
loss to benevolence and brotherhood unless the 
arbitrary munificence of industrial and financial 
overlords becomes the good-will that is guaranteed 
in law and practiced in the wealth-making process. 



The Demand 17 

To socialize the endeavor of all and to make each 
person a servant of the common good in the 
measure of his ability is the task of Christianity 
and the goal of civic training. In the degree in 
which such education fails, any shift in the balance 
of power, whether from capital to labor, from 
factory to farm, or from expert to politician, will 
only mean a new form of tyranny. All citizens, 
the capables as well as the struggling classes, stand 
in need of an education which shall define the 
essentials of the common good and energize their 
expression and use in law by the exhaustless 
dynamic of Christian faith. At the present time 
the world needs no further proof that efficiency 
unguided by the humane and democratic principles 
of the gospel becomes the arch enemy of civilization. 
The demand, however, for a church school of 
citizenship arises, not only from these fundamental 
conceptions of democracy, but equally from con- 
sideration of the specific problems confronting the 
nation. Some of these are industrial, having to do 
with the contending camps of capital and labor; 
some ethnic, having to do with immigration and 
the race problem; some correctional, judicial, 
educational, and what not; but, as Ellwood^ has 
pointed out, they may all be included in the prob- 
lem of living together. This very limited plea for 
the church school of citizenship cannot undertake 

^ Charles A. EUwood, The Social Problem ^ chap. i. 



1 8 The Church School of Citizexship 

to discuss these interrelated problems, each one of 
which has already produced an extensive literature. 
To strengthen the con\'iction that the facts involved 
in these issues of social morality should have a 
more important place in rehgious education and to 
indicate methods by which the facts may be so 
incorporated as to secure intelligent and moral 
attitudes in keeping ^ith the Christian religion is a 
sufficient task. The Christian mottoes on the 
walls of our national home need to step out of their 
frames and get into action. 

The temper of our entire people needs to be 
changed from that of negative criticism to that of 
idealistic support. By \'irtue of the wide and 
partisan publicity given to the failures and weak- 
nesses of ofiicials of every rank and because so much 
comment relative to pubHc ser\4ce is frankly 
c\Tiical there is need of a reappreciation of the 
essential principles for which the nation stands. 
It is clearly unjust to focus the attention of youth 
upon the pathological features of democratic 
evolution in such a way as to produce adolescent 
c\Tiics. The destruction of legitimate faith in any 
sphere is a serious blow to faith as a whole. The 
mere fact of reaching one's majority cannot make 
a good citizen of the youth who entertains the error 
that all positions of pubHc trust are secured by 
^^puU" and used for personal gain. The history 
of the United States is something more than the 



The Demand 19 

sum total of her mistakes. The slow achievements 
of democracy are sacred by virtue of what they cost 
and what they register. It is immoral to dismiss 
politics with the hypocritical epithet ^^ rotten." 
An education which encourages or permits one to 
stand apart from the struggle, as being thus more 
righteous, is not religious but antireligious. Cor- 
respondingly it is a form of treason to familiarize 
young people with the abuses of delegated power 
and to leave them uninformed as to those chapters 
in our history which might be headed Cuba, China, 
John Hay. 

The building of democracy calls for sound 
timber, and presumably some of the very best 
quality will be found in the uplands of the church 
domain. In view of the bearing of democracy on 
human rights and prospective world-peace may it 
not be quite as religious to select and to direct into 
public service those who are reliable, capable, and 
conscientious as it is to place them in the ministry 
or to send them to foreign-mission posts ? In order 
to make the standards of Jesus operative in the 
normal processes of society it is necessary that his 
followers serve in those processes, and it may well 
be that the church school of citizenship will result 
in sending into public life many first-rate persons 
who might otherwise have been content with 
merely passing their negative verdicts from safe 
positions on the side-Hnes. 



20 The Church School of Citizenship 

QUESTIONS, INVESTIGATIONS, EXPERIMENTS 

1. What reasons can you offer for giving civics a larger 
place in the church school at this time ? 

2. In what ways should the church's missionary pro- 
gram affect her civic teaching ? 

3. What should the church group demonstrate to society 
at large ? 

4. List the characteristics of the good citizen from 
(a) the point of view of monarchy and (b) the point of view 
of democracy. 

5. Why is philanthropy an unsatisfactory solution of 
ills in a democracy ? 

6. Whsit dangers may attend the revival of patriotism 
and good citizenship in the church ? 

7. Interpret civic service as an aid to personal reHgion. 

8. Illustrate the statement that the church must Chris- 
tianize the community or the community wiU paganize 
the church. 

9. Mention some examples of collective sin in your own 
community. 

10. What are the advantages of a good-citizenship 
platform as compared with a sectarian or party-politics 
platform ? 

11. W^hat results in public life might reasonably be 
expected from the church school of citizenship ? 

12. Discuss the question as to whether the church school 
should be exclusively a Bible school. 

READING RECOMMENDED 

Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics. 
Rauschenbusch, W., The Social Principles of Jesus. 
Ross, E. A., Sin and Society. 



CHAPTER II 
CIVIC TRAINING FOR CHILDHOOD 

It is the aim of this chapter to suggest certain 
forms of civic training suitable for small children 
and adapted to use in the church school. By use 
in the church school we mean that the activity 
may be carried on there, or that the school may 
inspire and direct the activity, receiving reports 
and granting suitable acknowledgment for what 
the small citizen does outside the class. 

If bragging and exaggeration are not encouraged 
there is distinct merit in the just, social recognition 
of good conduct which the class may give and which 
the child naturally craves. The civic effort of 
the pupil will be standardized and elevated by 
such a review, and good-will conduct in the home, 
on the street, and at school will be stimulated 
thereby. Observations of the helpful conduct of 
others should also be reported. 

An examination of all the Sunday-school lesson 
series has revealed the presence of some civic 
material in every case. Historically this presents 
itself, first, as entirely biblical; secondly^ as con- 
tributing to those personal virtues which must 
always underlie good citizenship; thirdly, as 

21 



22 The Church School of Citizenship 

treating some social problem — usually temperance 
— on its own merits; and fourthly, in the process 
of evolution, as dealing in similar fashion with 
other social and civic problems of the modern 
world. The tendency is toward modernism over 
the bridge of extra-biblical biography. There is 
a creditable amount of such material scattered 
through all the existing Sunday-school courses, and 
the aim of this book is to encourage its larger use, 
to give it coherence about a sustained civic ideal, 
to suggest teaching methods, and to enrich in 
quality and quantity the body of civic material 
for use in the church school. 

In this chapter we aim to make gradual progress 
from the earliest years of Sunday-school attendance 
up to the age of twelve. While the text follows 
this order it does not attempt to set the limits as 
specifically as would be necessary in a series of 
formal lessons. If the teachers and church people 
generally can be persuaded to embrace within the 
scope of religious education a larger civic content, 
then the actual organization of courses will not be 
long delayed. 

Attitudes are more important than information. 
Reverence is a virtue; theology is not necessarily 
so. The intellectual concepts of the child who 
kneels, clasps his hands, closes his eyes and bows 
his head in prayer may be quite fragile or imper- 
fect, but the act indicates and favors an attitude 



Civic Training for Childhood 23 

of mind which makes for personal religion. Within 
this attitude of reverence all that is knowable of 
God and man takes its place as experience widens, 
and although some of the information may be of a 
kind to test rather than to support faith, yet, with 
this attitude secure, the life will be ennobled and 
refined. 

It follows that the very blending of national 
symbols with those of the place and exercise of 
religion will bind together in a common respect 
and reverence the twofold obligation of duty to 
God and country. ^^ Above, about, within, and 
supporting all is God, and in his plan of protection, 
opportunity, and support for me is my country." 
The child may naturally feel that way about it. 
Both are vast, impalpable, real, continuing through 
the centuries, embracing life, benevolent. Bible 
and hymn and prayer, the flag, and the loving 
memory of patriot intertwine and embody these 
two realities. 

This is the philosophy of it, but the child is not 
interested in philosophy. Concretely his civic 
attitude will be determined by such visible things 
as the flag itself, by pictures of the noble dead, of 
his president and other notable officials, and of 
the large and humane enterprises by which the 
government protects and enriches the life of the 
people. Of marked influence also will be the 
celebration of the nation's festal days with his 



24 The Church School of Citizenship 

participation in song, recitation, march, decorations 
and feast, pantomime, pageant and dramatic play, 
and visits to historic spots, monuments, and govern- 
mental buildings. What he does and sees will shape 
his attitude of loyalty quite as much as what he is 
told. The best way of telling is the story growing 
out of the pictures and experiences above suggested. 

Furthermore, in order that the true patriotic 
spirit be confirmed in his immediate experience 
and conduct he should learn just what the govern- 
ment is doing for little children and what little 
children may do for it. No doubt the news 
method now used in moving-picture shows to 
inform the public on the vast and humane work 
of the government will be adapted to use in the 
church school and will greatly enhance civic educa- 
tion. Particularly all that interests the small 
child, such as milk inspection, pure water, protec- 
tion and safety on the streets, infant welfare, pub- 
lic parks with wading-pools, sand piles, and swings, 
children's departments in libraries with their 
story-telling hour, open-air schools for tubercular 
children, and many other exhibits of public concern 
for our very little citizens will, upon proper pre- 
sentation by film or printed picture with simple 
comment, incline the child to that just pride and 
gratitude which underlie good citizenship. 

Yet to know and enjoy all this is not sufficient. 
Some experience of partnership is desirable. With- 



Civic Training for Childhood 25 

out doing his part the child may drift into the 
great company of citizens who are strong for their 
^^ rights" but quite obHvious to their duties. Just 
as in the home such help as the child can give is the 
sure means of moralizing his affection, so in the 
community, to the extent of his relation therewith 
and of his ability to co-operate, he must lend a 
hand. Unfortunately the usual home background 
upon which civic co-operation might be depicted 
is very much of ^a moral blur. Whether sturdy or 
sickly the average small child from early infancy 
sets out to reign supreme, and most parents con- 
nive with an incipient absolute and irresponsible 
monarchy which bodes ill for democracy. At- 
tempts to upset the order and diurnal routine of 
the household are made very early and very suc- 
cessfully. Later, toys are scattered about and 
furnishings are abused and left in disorder for 
mother or maid to gather up and ^^set to rights.'' 
To this extent a little grafter comes into being 
who may exploit things generally and leave his 
proper burden of responsibility to the home govern- 
ment. 

Any successful training of the small child for 
citizenship must meet or overcome this rather 
common difficulty. The fond way in which the 
soft parent overtaxes the immature judgment of 
the small child by asking ^^ dearie'' whether he 
wouldn't like to do this or that clear personal or 



26 The Church School of Citizenship 

social duty implicit in home life will probably 
have to be changed into the higher kindliness of the 
imperative mood. However, either with or with- 
out this and other improvements in home regimen 
the church school of citizenship must set out with 
an action program including public duty and 
benevolence for the small child. The doctrine and 
practice of good- will must become his. 

Some of the items that may be included in the 
civic program of the child under public-school age 
are the sharing of toys with children in public 
institutions, the making of picture-books for them, 
paper-doll outfits, and contributions of ^^ goodies," 
both on special occasions and at other times 
throughout the year. This work might be organ- 
ized, assembled, and cleared through the church 
school, which would also stimulate home activity 
for this end. But benefaction is not the only or 
the main expression. In fact, for the church train- 
ing to stop with voluntary philanthropy is to miss 
the essential of democratic citizenship which is 
based, not upon optional good-will, but upon the 
just duties of a partnership. 

This great partnership, which includes the child 
and his family, makes streets, keeps them clean and 
in repair, safe and lighted. In order to do this 
many people work hard, all pay something, and 
some incur actual danger. The good partner will 
not litter the street with paper or other refuse, but 



Civic Training for Childhood 27 

on the contrary will help to keep it neat. He will 
not damage or destroy the lamps, trees, or shrubs, 
which belong to all, but on the contrary will protect 
such property. He will obey the traffic officer who 
makes it safe to cross the street and he will keep 
to his own side — the right side — of the walk. He 
will not spit upon the walk and he will help exter- 
minate flies and other pests. 

Such lessons seem trivial, but the ordinary 
pedestrian in our American cities having started 
wrong in these respects is a correspondingly con- 
firmed nuisance, expense, and liability to the com- 
munity. Accidents multiply, traffic is blocked or 
impeded, whole neighborhoods are unkempt, and 
a large army of men is kept busy in street and park 
picking up after these crude individualists who 
did not set out with the idea of ^^my city." Also 
much of the malicious mischief of boys of a some- 
what later age, when they break street lamps and 
deface public property, might be forestalled by 
such initial instruction in civil service. To open 
their eyes to the labor involved in public works 
and to listen to their accounts of how sewers are 
built, pavements laid, and fires fought may awaken 
and increase civic appreciation. 

It is probably necessary that some experience of 
personal ownership should underlie these attempts 
to train the child in the practice of that collective 
ownership which the citizen enjoys. Here again 



28 The Church School of Citizenship 

the methods of the home limit materially the 
degree of success of the church school. The secure 
and inviolate possession of his own things, a proper 
place for their safe-keeping, and particularly some 
experience in making his wealth as contrasted with 
much ingenuity in destroying it are imperative 
factors. Also some self-denial in saving enough 
to buy what he cannot make and in general a 
responsibility commensurate with his years and 
applied to his most cherished possessions seem 
necessary as a background for the proper respect 
of public property. 

However, the home, being a collective enter- 
prise, goes farther than the ''mine" with its cor- 
responding responsibility. It proceeds to ''ours." 
This is especially true where there are a number of 
children who play and work together. The church 
school is that sort of a family augmented and 
organized. Each one of these small children imder 
public-school age has his own outfit, bearing his 
name, and also his own place for its safe-keeping; 
while all imite in holding certain larger property 
and conveniences necessary to the group as a whole 
and too expensive for individual ownership. In- 
dividual and collective care of property makes for 
good citizenship, while the lavish and indis- 
criminate provision of material, whether in home 
or school, stifles appreciation and favors destruc- 
tion rather than conservation. 



Civic Training for Childhood 29 

Some children unfortunately seem to achieve 
consciousness as a soul mainly on the ^^no, no" 
basis. Their sense of importance is gratified by 
refusing to join in any group activities. The 
teacher of infant classes is familiar with the type 
and for the sake both of the individual and of 
society will try to overcome the timidity, awk- 
wardness, or selfishness which, if allowed to persist, 
will blight the life and thwart citizenship. Of 
all teachers one must most revere the kinder- 
gartner who can detect and remove this antisocial 
bias. She is truly serving the state. 

The child's entry to the church school and all 
of his experiences therein should make for courtesy 
and decorum. Good manners are a part of good 
citizenship. Instead of undermining the child's 
respect for those who by virtue of position or age 
are worthy of fine regard, and instead of making 
the 'place of worship ridiculous by hubbub and 
disorder, the church school should foster whatever 
good breeding the home may have initiated, or 
begin that which the home has neglected. Parallel 
with the smartness developing when the child 
enters the public school there is the irreverence 
frequently noted when the child attends Simday 
school. The decline of this virtue may not be 
fatal. There may indeed be some compensating 
gain in friendliness and naturalness, but cheap- 
ness and lack of sense of fitness and proportion 



30 The Church School of Citizenship 

make against civic virtue. Start the children 
wrong in that institution whose function it is to 
conserve the sacred things of life, and the chances 
for continuance in a brazen conceit oblivious to the 
sanctuary values of God and country are multi- 
plied. ^' There is no necessary connection between 
democracy and rudeness and slouchy conduct and 
manner There is no necessary causal con- 
nection between an abolition of privilege, caste, 
and class, and bad manners."^ Possibly greater 
care in such matters might tend to remedy the 
indecorous haste and confusion so often exhibited 
at the close of public worship, where the haste to 
grab wraps, the ear-splitting efforts of the organ, 
and shrill gossip dissipate in one explosion any 
approach to formal reverence which the service 
may have induced. 

This prevalent scandal which makes against all 
public order has as antecedent the noisy class- 
room, the late-comer, the slovenly work, the 
scramble for the best seat, and the general fail- 
ure of that orderly helpfulness which might be 
secured by officers and teachers who would take 
pains always to be in place before the children 
arrive and whose knowledge and exercise of dis- 
cipline measured up to the importance of their 
task. 

^ E. L. Cabot, A Course in Citizenship^ Introd., p. xiv (William 
H. Taft). 



Civic Training foe. Childhood 31 

Advancing a grade or so to the time when the 
child becomes famiHar with the street by virtue of 
going to the pubHc school and using the street for 
play and adventure, the very important matter 
of his early contacts with the agents of government 
comes to the fore. To the small child of this age 
the policeman is the government, and his attitude 
toward officials, as toward law and its enforce- 
ment, is largely determined by his experience with 
the police officer. Unfortunately there is here also 
an unfavorable background for good citizenship. 
At least in all cases where exasperated parents have 
held over the child the threat to have the police- 
man *^get'' him if he fails to obey, or disobeys, 
parental commands, and in cases where the child 
is familiar with Sunday-supplement caricatures of 
the officer, it becomes especially difficult to build 
up the right relationship. For in the one case he 
regards the policeman as his natural enemy and 
in the other as a joke. In order to offset this very 
prevalent misunderstanding the church school 
should find the right kind of officer to be invited 
to attend several of its sessions for the purpose of 
pleasant acquaintance with the children and of 
instructing them as to how they may help him in 
rendering the city safe and bringing the maximum 
happiness and benefit to all. Perhaps the most 
important item in such a plan is the establishment 
of this friendly co-operation in place of the blind 



32 The Church School of Citizenship 

enmity which too often exists. It is not in place 
here to indicate the improvements in the personnel^ 
duties, and methods of the poHce necessary to the 
largest success of such a policy, but the principle 
holds true that the best way to secure finer service 
from the poHce is to expect it of them and to 
include them in the common aim of church and 
state to promote justice, safety, and well-being. 
To appreciate and use the policeman in this simple 
way may, while helping both the child and the 
ofl&cer, lead to larger co-operation of the whole 
church in law enforcement. 

Possibly before this time the child will have 
made the acquaintance of the postman, the most 
welcome of public servants. The delight of the 
first letter or parcel received by mail leaves the 
door of the mind ajar for some explanation of this 
wonderful service, and it is quite possible to make 
a postage stamp a very good text for a civic lesson 
in the church school. Moreover the postman, like 
the policeman, might well attend the school and 
explain his work and how the boys and girls can 
help him. One feels sure that with this sort of 
friendship they will not keep him waiting at the 
door or ask unreasonable favors. Probably it is 
not possible to develop the same refinements of 
appreciation in the case of the iceman, ashman, 
garbage man, and milkman, but the fact that they 
are very necessary servants whom we should help 



Civic Training for Childhood 33 

needs to be impressed upon the child. Those 
who perform these duties are so frequently over- 
looked or looked down upon that to develop in the 
child a Christian attitude toward them is identical 
with training for citizenship. 

Then there is the health ofi&cer, whose duty it 
is to keep people well and to protect little children 
and others from contagious diseases. In order 
to do this he must sometimes quarantine the family 
so that the child cannot go out to play or to school. 
The latter privation may be endured without excess 
of grief so far as the child is concerned, but the 
frequency with which families unlawfully jeopardize 
the health of others calls for full explanation of the 
civic duty of observing quarantine. Here again 
the presence of the health officer in the church 
school, with his explanation of why the liberties 
of some must be curtailed for the safety of all and 
his stories of what happens when the health laws 
are broken, may assist the children themselves to 
observe the law and aid them in fortifying the 
flabby citizenship of their parents. 

Imagine also the place of the fireman in the 
church school of citizenship. The sessions in 
which he tells his experiences and intersperses the 
rules for fire prevention and fire fighting will be 
all too brief. And yet if you want matches, gaso- 
line, and ashes kept in their places, fire escapes 
clear of obstacles, and cool-minded citizens for 



34 The Church School of Citizenship 

emergencies, why not use our good friend whose 
civic halo the children can already see ? 

Such a method will be effective not alone with 
the small child. One of the best pieces of civic 
study which the author has directed was under- 
taken by a picked group of eighth-grade boys who 
in weekly sessions throughout a whole winter 
devoted themselves to an understanding of the 
fire department of a great city. In addition to 
the less romantic information on fire prevention 
they learned by visit and observation the intricate 
methods of the electric fire-call system and wrote 
very good papers on many phases of fire-fighting, 
rescue work, and resuscitation, as well as biog- 
raphies of the notable fire-fighting heroes of the 
force. 

These are the first public officers of the child's 
acquaintance and the day school is his first public 
institution. Ordinarily the child hears of it as a 
free school and undoubtedly in some instances 
even fancies that he should be paid for spending 
his valuable time therein. None too often will its 
nature, purpose, and cost of upkeep per child have 
been explained to the unthinking or unwilling 
patron of this greatest American institution. It 
is quite possible that an interpretation of the school 
as the community's largest contribution to child- 
hood could be made with considerable grace and 
effectiveness in the church school. In a word, the 



Civic Training eor Childhood 35 

church school will assist the child to those early 
appreciations which make all the difference between 
school life as an imposition and as a generous 
opportunity to learn and to help. The various 
ways of helping the teacher and of benefiting the 
school, when pointed out at the outset of school 
life, will find ready response from the average child. 
For to be big enough to help and important enough 
to count in the rating and welfare of the school is 
a compliment which the normal child craves and 
heeds. 

The consciousness of such importance will 
reduce the number of ^^don'ts'' with which the 
child who is learning street deportment is usually 
beset. Helping and directing strangers will be 
according to form. Taunting peddlers, snow- 
balling women and smaller children, throwing 
stones, and indulging the vast nuisance-making 
propensities of boyhood of this age will give place 
in part to a semiofficial responsibility. It must be 
assumed, however, that the play organization and 
facilities of the community will be such as to satisfy 
the desire for adventure and physical experiment 
which must otherwise be registered in these 
unsocial ways. 

From the civic point of view it has been through 
lack or scarcity of such connections with the child's 
practical daily life that religious education has 
been hitherto somewhat weak. In so far as the 



36 The Church School of Citizenship 

content of religious education has lacked applica- 
tion in the home, on the street, or at school, by 
that measure has it been inadequate for character- 
building and negligible for good citizenship. The 
value of clarifying and standardizing behavior in 
these fields familiar and necessary to child life 
consists, not solely in the fact that it is sound 
pedagogy, but, for our purpose, in the fact that 
the very remote in time and place and the very 
unusual, however fascinating, in story form may, 
taken alone, leave him quite unfitted for social 
conduct. The supposition that the child will of 
himself bridge the gap and transfer the best or any 
part of the antique, however noble, to the situations 
which are actually his is often too generous. 
Furthermore there is the constant danger of so 
identifying religion and its practice with experi- 
ences that are never his that he may never so 
much as entertain the hope or purpose of being 
a good child of God in these normal and necessary 
relationships. 

Among the lessons of this early period, and as 
especially timely in the present world-crisis, the 
prospective citizen needs training in thrift and 
conservation. No waste, whether of water at the 
tap, electricity, gas, fuel, food, clothing, or any- 
thing else can be condoned as less than immoral. 
These things mean the very life of people and 
possibly of democracy itself. Probably there has 



Civic Teaining for Childhood 37 

never been a time of like advantage in gathering 
every child into the hallowing influence of a great 
cause. Intemperance, whimsicalness, indulgence, 
extravagance — these and their allies have no place 
in the conduct of the child, who, being unable to 
serve in military fashion, may yet serve truly and 
effectively in the spirit of the same noble discipline 
of the soldier. The war, in itself a ghastly failure 
of human intelligence, morality, and religion, will 
nevertheless snatch our youth from sordid self- 
seeking, emancipate and ennoble our women, and 
save our children from the wasteful habits that have 
become national. 

So close to conscience may the church school 
bring the many phases of this vast problem that a 
whole army of children will interpret national need 
and rise to a great experience of self-control and 
real helpfulness within a sphere where duty rules 
desire. This is already imder way and has epoch- 
making possibilities for religious education. To be 
devoted to a just cause to the extent of sacrifice 
in the field of one's cherished and conscious satis- 
factions is to be on the path that shineth more and 
more unto the perfect day. Here again the ad- 
vantage of a spiritual appeal that calls for action 
rather than for mere appreciation assures by its 
very nature actual training in citizenship. 

The whole vexed problem of obedience is 
smoothed out under the grave consciousness that 



38 The Church School of Citizenship 

we are at war, and soldierly virtues of prompt 
execution without complaint are practical in rising, 
washing, dressing, partaking of plain food, doing 
chores as a military detail, and, in a word, accepting 
the regimen necessary to worthy partnership in 
the cause. This vivid sense of enlistment need 
not necessarily vanish with the return of peace if 
only the children are thus habituated to the de- 
mands of collective living and effort and gradually 
acquainted with the urgent cause of righteousness 
and humanity which always needs the same 
chivalrous support and service. The church school 
has a remarkable opportunity to build up and 
carry over for permanent use this great body of 
social morality which is the bone and sinew of good 
citizenship. 

Who can measure the value of children's savings 
which, instead of being squandered in candy and 
needless toys, have gone and are going into the 
Liberty Loan? In addition to the individual 
value of these self-denials there is the profound 
sense of partnership with one's country in behalf 
of the world's welfare. Every little bank — and 
their name is legion — that has been emptied into 
the United States treasury has guaranteed a finer 
loyalty on the part of the young investor, and every 
bond possessed is a certificate of better citizenship. 
Every child in the church school should have some 
part in this patriotic effort. 



Civic Teaining for Childhood 39 

Probably from the age of eight or ten years 
onward the even greater joy of producing wealth 
from the soil may be encouraged and directed by 
the church school. Here is a great opportunity 
to enrich the summer program which for most 
schools has been flimsy and lacking in appeal. 
Probably there is no more satisfactory and timely 
religious exercise for the child of this age than to 
co-operate with God in producing the food that 
is necessary to life. Not only the sense of dignity 
and usefulness in meeting the acute need of the 
present time is to be taken into account, but 
the more lasting benefit that comes from the 
nurture and care of plants, from participation in 
nature's scheme of cause and effect, from the 
labor which compels appreciation of the food we 
eat, from emulation and joint endeavor, aesthetics, 
patience, perseverance, and the ennobling experi- 
ence of adding to the world's wealth something 
which without the child's effort would not have 
existed. 

It is to be hoped that religious education, which 
in some instances has been forced into this field 
by the present crisis, will make itself at home here 
for future service and that the classes and groups 
which can be held intact for the summer season 
will be provided with plots and directors, so that 
the activity side of the church school, which has 
always been inadequate, and the summer program. 



40 The Church School of Citizenship 

which has lacked vitaHty, may be improved in 
rendering this larger service to the children. 

There is no reason why the church gardens 
might not culminate in Thanksgiving exhibits, 
services, and distributions to the needy; and the 
exhibits might well include, besides the best samples 
of green vegetables, also those products that have 
been canned, preserved, or dried, as also the cost 
accounts of the various undertakings. The extent 
to which this might be done in village and country 
districts, where poultry and live stock might be 
included in the experiment, would be such as to 
form a real bond between the church school and 
the progress and welfare of the community. 
Wherever the products were sufficiently large to 
be sold the individual and the working group in 
collective enterprises would have the further 
education of determining the cause to which some 
of the returns should be donated. The great 
freedom of the church to experiment in this field 
and the fact that the public-school organization 
is abandoned for the summer, leaving hosts of 
children with all too little to do, constitute a chal- 
lenge to be eagerly accepted. 

Among the civic benefits to be expected from 
such a program one should include the likelihood 
of directing more of our future citizens into 
lives of productive toil. The number of persons 
engaged in trade or barter of various kinds, persons 



Civic Training for Childhood 41 

whose labor, however remunerative, is not ele- 
mentally productive, always tends to be relatively 
too great. So also the professional and advisory 
classes of society are distended with fee collectors 
of one kind and another. The scramble to get 
away from the soil and so from one of the sanest 
and most useful vocations may be corrected in 
part by these happy experiments, in which through 
the church school many a child who would other- 
wise remain ignorant of the joy of production may 
discover the clue to a happy and highly useful life. 

It should be pointed out also that as contrasted 
with athletics, whose place in civic training will 
later be discussed, gardening with its emulation 
of the workers engaged affords an experience quite 
as useful for citizenship as the contests in which 
one party wins and the other loses. The degrees 
of excellence, down to the lowest, register some 
real measure of success, something of value accom- 
plished, and this is not always possible in athletic 
contests. Emulation is perhaps in the long run a 
higher civic exercise than is the ^^I win, you lose'^ 
contest. 

In gardening there is a refinement also in the 
working out of cause and effect. In the abstract, 
no doubt, the exercise in arithmetic may bring 
this home to the child. Unless the component 
items and operations are correct the result will be 
wrong. Similarly the working of cause and effect 



42 The Church School or Citizenship 

in static fashion is brought home in manual train- 
ing, where the imperfect part or shoddy work mars 
or even ruins the article as an assembled whole. 
But in gardening one is working with live and 
growing things. He is partner with great, mysteri- 
ous forces whose working is sufficiently known to 
dictate the gardener's part if success is to be 
achieved. To deal with things in the making and 
to have nature register your mistakes and neglect 
or your wisdom and diligence in her assembly of 
materials seen and unseen into a product not 
before in existence — this is a very religious manner 
of learning the moral nature of our orderly world. 
The shiftlessness and failure of many of the 
triflers, ne'er-do-wells, and hard-luck apologists 
who are a debit to society and a menace to the 
state could be traced in part to the uncorrected 
juvenile philosophy, so favorable to laziness and 
so convenient for excuse, which places the blame 
upon things and does not manfully take its place 
in the succession of cause and effect. A rather 
extended experience with children convinces one 
that such fatalism is their besetting philosophy. 
Whether by virtue of animistic ideas, attributing 
personality to things, or through fear of dis- 
approval and punishment they follow the method 
of Eve with the serpent and Aaron with the golden 
calf. Things just happen. The causal relation 
between effort and result does not figure. It is a 



Civic Training for Childhood 43 

gamble. Why hold them responsible ? The vase 
fell and crashed, the water spilled, the plants died, 
poverty existed, war broke out, injustice prevailed, 
and all similar conceptions of individual and social 
fatality in which responsible human action hides 
or escapes come from lack of such grouping in 
moral order as may be had in unsurpassed fashion 
through experiment with the productive soil. 

Nor can one lightly regard the civic value 
attaching to an actual performance of the labor 
and care incident to the successful production of 
food. Perhaps the best cure for wastefulness as 
for complaining about one's rations is to know by 
experience the labor cost which the articles embody. 
Many a social gulf now separating people into 
distinct and unsympathetic, if not antagonistic, 
classes could be bridged here and there if only the 
individuals on both sides knew by actual experience 
the amount of life that has gone into the homely 
necessities by which we live. To have half of 
our population wholly uninitiated in this respect 
is to court misunderstanding and an irreverent use 
of wealth. 

So far nothing has been said of aesthetics, but 
on the border at least of this enterprise are flowers, 
and no child having fellowship with them can 
escape some degree of refinement. The well-kept 
shrubs, trees, lawns, and flower beds are part of 
the common wealth. They tell the passer-by of 



44 The Church School of Citizenship 

one form of good citizenship which the proprietor 
or occupant of the premises is glad to practice. 
Moreover, from the church garden there will be 
flowers for the pulpit and flowers for the sick of 
the parish. Surely the time has come when the 
many slovenly and ill-kept church grounds should 
be transformed into exhibits of good citizenship, 
and the children, given leadership and opportimity, 
will do this. The planting of a tree is the enrich- 
ment of the state. 

Those who live with little children are impressed 
with their proclivity for nature worship. For 
them at least the Maker of the universe must be 
he whose handicraft is in stars and sun and moon, 
clouds and rain, trees and flowers, and all growing 
things. Is it not in the nature of a benediction 
that their hands should help Him fashion some- 
thing new, that the mystery of the life-process 
should come to them clean and beautiful, and that 
in all this they should lay the foundation of good 
citizenship in being workers together with God ? 

Because of the cosmopolitan character of our 
population and the child's quick assumption of 
family or adult prejudice there should be some 
effort on the part of the church school to keep the 
child's judgment of alien races, as represented by 
classmates and playmates, upon the basis of real 
merit. Possibly at the present time there is some 
danger of fiercely closing the door against values 



Civic Training for Childhood 45 

whose only condemnation is that they are not 
native American. It would be well for the chil- 
dren to know how people of foreign birth say and 
do certain things, sometimes with more aptness 
and skill than we manifest, and to appreciate their 
part in making one great, happy family of those 
who have come together here from all quarters of 
the globe. All are immigrants, all have or should 
have a chance, and eminence and honor have been 
achieved by representatives of every race. The 
eagerness of the children of the foreign-born to 
become and to be rated true Americans should be 
met with cordial assistance, and the cheap epithets 
which retard that process are not the utterances 
of real patriotism. The neighbor's happiness is 
ours, his health ours, his morality ours. Deficiency 
in these, whether on his part or ours, is a mutual 
loss. 

Therefore, from the very first the stranger in our 
midst, whether the shy newcomer to the school or 
the immigrant in our neighborhood, is to be treated 
as our guest, to be made at home, to be assisted 
in all matters of speech and custom, to have our 
greetings and good wishes, and to share in any 
advantage we may have from our earlier arrival in 
this good land. Let no one think this an easy task. 
It will require line upon line and precept upon 
precept, for there is very much of the primitive 
in small children, and the person with peculiarities, 



46 The Church School of Citizenship 

whether in speech, dress, or any deformity, is the 
barbarian whose good treatment is secure only 
after a large amount of social imagination has been 
developed. Probably it is for this reason that the 
untrained child is rude to the aged, thoughtless 
of cripples, afraid of the deformed, and cruel to 
those who are very obviously not of his social caste. 
By mutual helpfulness and courtesy in the 
church school, by helping one another in mastering 
lessons and the smaller children in putting on their 
wraps and rubbers, by sharing the best we have, 
by giving preference to others in occupying the 
favorite seat, and by all of that quiet and cheerful 
concern which marks Christian breeding we may 
preserve the gallantry which a misconceived 
democracy threatens, and add ease and grace to 
the process of living together. The charm of 
democracy depends, after all, upon the presence 
of this spirit. Harsh and unyielding demands for 
every least particle of one's rights is inoperative 
in either family or community living, and the fra- 
grance of the American ideal is not that of a single 
flower but rather the successful blend of many. 

QUESTIONS, INVESTIGATIONS, EXPERIMENTS 

1. Discuss the music program of your school in its 
bearing upon patriotism and citizenship. 

2. Examine your school's use of pictures and other 
emblems having civic value and report in detail to your 
study group. 



Civic Training for. Childhood 47 

3. What civic lessons for children in about the third 
and fourth grades do you find in the following stories: The 
Good Samaritan, Joseph, Moses, David, Ruth ? 

4. List the acts by which a child may prove himself a 
good citizen in the home. 

5. Do the same for the street. 

6. For the playground. 

7. For the day school. 

8. For the Sunday school. 

9. In what ways could your school acquaint the chil- 
dren with pubHc servants and bring about co-operation ? 

10. Describe any gardening experiment which your 
school has attempted. 

11. What public holidays do you observe and how? 

12. What have your pupils done to aid the Red Cross, 
Liberty Loan, or the soldiers and sailors in any way? 

13. For the older elementary grades let your pupils list 
the public properties which they use or enjoy and ascertain 
their cost. 

14. Have them also make an itemized statement show- 
ing the annual cost per child for food, clothing, amuse- 
ments, and benevolence. 

15. Have the children describe their pets and exactly 
how they care for them, or, if they have none, their plants 
and toys and how they care for them. 

16. Have reports of a week's observation covering deeds 
of the following character: kindness to animals, playmates, 
and aged, sick, or crippled persons; courtesy at home, on 
the street, and in shop, car, or school; honesty as opposed 
to immediate self-interest; cheerfulness against odds; 
generosity with reference to things to eat, toys, chances to 
play, or other opportunities for enjoyment; neatness as 
to person and care of clothes; faithfulness in keeping 
promises, being prompt, and doing exactly one's best. 

(The Hst can be greatly extended and varied. It might 
be well to make the individual child's assignment for the 
week the observation of but one of these virtues, thus 
covering a wide range with the help of each pupil; or, to 



48 The Church School of Citizenship 

work more extensively on the several virtues, having all 
members of the class report on a single virtue assigned 
week by week.) 

17. Make inquiry as to how many of the children have 
savings accounts and see what improvement in this respect 
you can bring about in six months. 

18. Ascertain how many homes have a story-hour and 
keep record of how many adopt this custom while the 
pupils are in your class. 

19. Ascertain the nationalities represented in your class 
and have a representative of each tell of some notable 
person of his own race. 

20. Plan some piece of work for the adornment or con- 
venience of your classroom, or that of some other teacher, 
or of the general assembly room, and have your pupils thus 
contribute by their own effort and skill to the common good. 

2 1 . According to your own ingenuity and your knowledge 
of the situation experiment with sealed orders somewhat as 
follows: 

Mary Russell 

To be opened Monday, October 29, at 4:00 p.m. 

The sealed envelope thus addressed might contain orders 
such as: 

Please use the inclosed money, $1 . 00, for flowers, or anything 
else that you may choose, to cheer our classmate, Olive Bates, 
who is sick and who lives at 417 Maple Street. Come prepared 
next Sunday to report to the class exactly what you have done? 
when you did it, and how our classmate is. 

Your loving teacher, 

Margaret Young 

(This form is intended as suggestive only. The idea 
could be used to cover reports on absentees, providing books, 
Sunday-school material, and toys to the sick, or even for 



Civic Training for Childhood 49 

recruiting new pupils to the school. Possibly for boys it 
might be made a little more peremptory or military in tone.) 

22. Get the older boys of the elementary grades to 
report on pieces of co-operative work going on in the com- 
munity, such as construction, paving, water installation, 
bridge building, track elevation, or any similar under- 
takings, which they usually watch with interest, and, on 
the basis of their reports, elucidate citizenship as a co- 
operative task. 

22,, Make an outline of a lesson on "Why the Saloon 
Must Go.'' 

24. With a week's notice, have a symposium by the 
older children on what man living or dead has done the most 
for America, with reasons for each verdict. 

25. Similarly as to what woman holds this place and why. 

26. On the basis of the weekly programs of moving 
pictures to be exhibited in your immediate vicinity, ascer- 
tain which, if any, have such civic value that your class of 
older children might plan to go in a body with you as 
guardian. Make a record of the impressions made on the 
children as evidenced by their conversation at the time 
and in class discussion on the following Sunday. 

27. According to the grades under twelve years repre- 
sented in your school, list the more important interests of 
{a) boys and ih) girls which should serve as (i) opportunity 
and (2) material for civic training. 

28. Ascertain how many of the children go to the public 
library, what stories they have heard told there during the 
past month, and what books they have drawn and read. 

29. Have the children state in their own words why the 
pubHc should be grateful to the following workers: doctor, 
nurse, poHceman, fireman, teacher, minister, mother, 
locomotive engineer, towerman, lighthouse keeper, street 
cleaner, sewer builder, milk inspector, garbage collector. 



50 The Church School of Citizenship 

30. Make a collection of biblical stories of patriotic and 
civic worth and put them in form for effective telling to the 
younger pupils. 

READING RECOMMENDED 

Cabot, Ella Lyman (Editor). A Course in Citizenship. 

This is the most useful single book for the teaching of civics 
to children of elementary-school grade. The author is indebted 
to it for many of his ideas and much of his bibliography. The 
material, although selected and arranged for use in the public 
schools, is equally valuable for the church school, and the book 
is recommended as the best handbook for the teacher. 

FOR THE PUPIL 

I. In the Lower Grades 

(The teacher will read or tell the story, or assign it for the 
story-hour at home.) 

Babbitt, Ellen C. Jataka Tales. 

Baldwin, James. American Book of Golden Deeds. 

. Fifty Famous Stories Retold. 

Cary, Phoebe. "A Leak in the Dike'' {Poetical Works of 

Alice and Phoebe Cary). 
. ''A Legend of the Northland" (Poetical Works of 

Alice and Phoebe Cary). 
Coe, F. E. The First Book of Stories for the Story Teller. 
Stevenson, R. L. A Child'' s Garden of Verses. 
Taylor, Bayard. Boys of Other Countries. 
Wade, Mary H. The Wonder Workers. 

2. In the Middle Grades 

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 
Barton, Clara. History of the Red Cross. 
Coe, F. E. Heroes of Everyday Life. 



Civic Training for Childhood 51 

Hale, Edward E. The Man without a Country. 

Hill, Mabel. Lessons for Junior Citizens. 

Jewett, F. G. Town and City. 

Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. 

Lodge, H. C, and Roosevelt, T. Hero Tales from American 

History. 
Moffett, Cleveland. Careers of Danger and Daring. 
Riis, Jacob. Children of the Tenements. 
Sangster, M. E. Little Knights and Ladies, 
Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty. 
Washington, B. T. Up from Slavery. 

3. In the Older Elementary Grades 

Dodge, M. M. Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates. 

Foote, A. E., and Skinner, A. W. Explorers and Fownders 

of America. 
Grenfell, W. T. Labrador. 
Hasbrouck, Louise. The Boy^s Parkman. 
Kipling, R. The Seven Seas: Poems. 
Lessons in Community and National Life. United States 

Bureau of Education. Section C, Lessons 3, 5, 6, 

and 8. 
Montague, M. P. Closed Doors. 

Gives sympathetic appreciation of deaf-mutes. 

Perry, F. M., and Kingsley, N. F. Four American In- 
ventors. 

Pyle, Howard. Men of Iron. 

. Otto of the Silver Hand. 

Red Cross Magazine. 

Rooseveh, T. "Roll of Honor of the New York PoHce," 
Century Magazine^ OctohtT^i^g"]. 

Tappan, E. M. American Hero Stories. 

Tolstoi, Leo. Twenty-three Tales, 



52 The Church School of Citizenship 

FOR THE TEACHERS 

1. Of the Lower Grades 

All the reading assigned for the children, so that the stories 
may be told and discussed with sympathy and imagi- 
nation. 

Aesop's Fables. 

Bryant, S. C. Stories to Tell to Children, 

Guitteau, W. B. Preparing for Citizenship. 

Wyche, K. T. Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them, 

2, Of the Middle Grades 

Barnes, M. C. and C. L. The New America. 

Brooks, E. S. The Century Book for Young Americans. 

Dole, C. F. The Young Citizen. 

Dunn, A. W. The Community and the Citizen. 

Frayser, N. C. The Sunday School and Citizenship. 

Gulliver, L. The Friendship of Nations. 

3. Of the Older Elementary Grades 

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 
Hutchinson, Woods. Handbook of Health. 
Richman, J., and Wallach, I. R. Good Citizenship. 
Roosevelt, T. American Ideals and Other Essays. 
. The Winning of the West. 



CHAPTER III 
CIVIC TRAINING FOR EARLY ADOLESCENCE 

This chapter aims to indicate what the church 
school may do in teaching civics to boys and girls 
between the ages of twelve and fifteen years inclu- 
sive. These four years are generally recognized 
as covering the most critical period of development, 
and their right use is of vast significance in deter- 
mining social attitudes. It is not in point here 
to enter into a description of the bodily changes 
and mental characteristics which because of their 
undoubted importance have possessed an almost 
morbid interest for educators. No conscientious 
teacher will attempt to impart civics or any other 
subject without a knowledge of the distinctive 
features of this most important period. 

There is a larger civic element in existing 
Sunday-school lessons for pupils of this age than 
will be found for those of elementary grade. The 
International Graded Series treats temperance in 
three biographical lessons with John B. Gough, 
Neal Dow, and Frances E. Willard as the sub- 
jects for study. The Scribner Series has a lesson 
also on Frances E. Willard and, like the Inter- 
national, one or two on self-control. But in the 

53 



54 The Church School of Citizenship 

second intermediate year, the first quarter, the 
Scribner Series provides twelve lessons on civics 
which are very valuable. They cover the right 
to life, property, fair dealing, rest, truth, and the 
rights of parents, animals, the unprotected, and the 
state. Reverence in speech and conduct, justice 
in punishments, and conduct and law are also 
discussed. 

In the University of Chicago Publications in 
Religious Education a great deal of the entire 
course entitled Problems of Boyhood bears a sig- 
nificant relation to citizenship, while the subject is 
specifically treated in Study XVII. Similarly the 
Y.M.C.A. course. Life Questions of High-School 
Boys, has civic value as a whole and treats politics 
explicitly in Study XIII. 

In Section B of Lessons in Community and 
National Life, published by the United States 
Bureau of Education, Lesson 4 on ^^ Feeding a 
City," Lesson 5 on ^^ Saving the Soil," and Lesson 8 
on ^^ Finding a Job" contain valuable material. 

The Sunday-school session alone, which is 
inadequate for the younger children, becomes even 
less effective during this age, and a civic program 
based upon a session so temporary and restricted 
cannot make a deep impression on these busy and 
enthusiastic people. The fact also of a marked 
tendency toward organization and self-government, 
appearing at about this time, favors the formation 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 55 

of groups with greater solidarity and more occasions 
for collective action. Dictation becomes less 
effective, deliberation and debate more valuable. 
Action and variety are necessary. The former 
'^what?'' and '^why?'' of the child, which were 
largely in the nature of a game by which to extract 
remarks from adults, become more rational and 
inquisitive. 

The gangs in which boys find such satisfaction 
and which are formed under the urge of sex con- 
sciousness, play necessities, and mutual protec- 
tion are potential for great gains in citizenship 
if properly handled, and productive of serious 
harm if neglected. Ideally the class in the church 
school is also the club or a component division of 
the club. Such an arrangement will promote all 
the group activities, provide education in self- 
government and discipline, and give value to the 
week-day meetings for social, athletic, and civic 
ends. 

Such organization, effected for the boys and 
girls separately, is favorable to an action program 
which will enlarge the group experience of collec- 
tive effort beyond the possibilities of the ordinary 
Sunday-school class. Electing officers, determin- 
ing policy, financing the group needs, appropriating 
funds, appointing committees, receiving and acting 
upon reports, promoting freedom of discussion, and 
making those adjustments by which majority rule 



56 The Church School of Citizenship 

becomes enlightened and group endeavor becomes 
unified will of itself supply valuable civic training. 

The effect of this method in mitigating the con- 
ceit of those who have always had their own way, 
in reducing to practical, workable terms the 
luxuriant ideals of the more creative minds of the 
group, and in defining the area of substantial agree- 
ment that will enlist the support of all is altogether 
an asset for democracy. Also the ways by which 
the group must undertake to inform itself by refer- 
ence to committees and by awaiting reports mean 
much for social and civic sanity. The rudiments 
of parliamentary procedure can be mastered only 
in some such way as this. 

Substantial gains in Sunday-school discipline 
also follow these attempts at self-government. 
The esprit de corps attained in the conduct of social 
and athletic affairs carries over to the Sunday 
session, and the club adviser, who is also the teacher 
of the class, holds his position by its choice and as 
one of its number. In contrast with the old situa- 
tion, where the teacher was a sort of enemy alien, 
he is now a friendly ally, while success or failure 
depends upon the class as such. For the individual 
pupil the disciplinary effect of the judgment of his 
peers is far greater than that of his elders, however 
wise. Discipline becomes automatic and social. 

However, it should be emphasized that the 
teacher who expects these happy Sunday experi- 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 57 

ences and this growth of his pupils in good citizen- 
ship must be bound into the hfe of the group by 
sharing fully in the athletic victories and defeats, 
the social pastimes and specialties, whether of 
collecting, hiking, camping, or what not, which 
constitute the apperceptive mass and the social 
cement of his little commonwealth. If this ^^we" 
consciousness is not inclusive of the teacher by 
virtue of the fact that he or she will not or cannot 
pay the price in generous self-giving, then all the 
discomforts of the superimposed official may be 
expected, and the pupils are expert in this matter, 
having a range that runs all the way from inatten- 
tion, through comedy, to collective opposition. 

For boys the simplest and most effective form 
of the class-club organization for citizenship is 
the Boy Scouts of America. No other movement 
compares with this in locating and using the inter- 
est centers of boy life, in stimulating and stand- 
ardizing civic conduct, and in bringing about 
co-operation with the church. If the boy's ^^be- 
longing" were confined to but one organization 
and his library to but one book, his future as a 
citizen would be bright by virtue of his scout 
membership alone and his civic education superior 
through his possession and use of the best existing 
book on citizenship — the official Handbook for Boys. 
It is a very remarkable thing that the most suc- 
cessful pedagogy for this age and the most virile 



58 The Church School of Citizenship 

religion also should have been supplied, not from 
the formal institutions school and church, as such, 
but by an outside movement with no canons to 
defend and only boy nature to dictate its policies. 
Happily, however, there is not the slightest an- 
tagonism between the scout movement and 
methods and the historic organizations which are 
making generous use of all its privileges. 

Before indicating the details of co-operation 
between the church school and the scout troop it 
may be well to consider some of the elements of 
scouting that have a direct bearing on training for 
citizenship. First among these is the avowed 
purpose of the movement. 

The Boy Scouts of America is a corporation formed by a 
group of men who are anxious that the boys of America 
should come under the influence of this movement and be 
built up in all that goes to make character and citizenship. 
.... A scout knows his city as well as he knows the trails 
in the forest. He can guide a stranger wherever he desires 
to go, and this knowledge of short cuts saves him many 
needless steps. He knows where the police stations are 
located, where the fire-alarm boxes are placed, where the 
nearest doctor Hves, where the hospitals are, and which is 
the quickest way to reach them. He knows the names 
of the city officials and the nature of their duties. A scout 
is proud of his city and freely offers his services when he 
can help. 

A scout is a patriot and is always ready to serve his 
country at a minute's notice. He loves Old Glory and 
knows the proper forms of offering it respect. He never 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 59 

permits its folds to touch the ground. He knows how his 
country is governed and who are the men in high authority. 
He desires a strong body, an alert mind, and an uncon- 
querable spirit, so that he may serve his country in any 
need. He patterns his life after those of great Americans 
who have had a high sense of duty and who have served the 
nation well. 

A scout chooses as his motto ^^Be Prepared,'' and he 
seeks to prepare himself for anything — to rescue a com- 
panion, to ford a stream, to gather firewood, to help 
strangers, to distinguish right from wrong, to serve his 
fellowmen, his country, and his God — always to ^^Be 
Prepared."^ 

The great aim of the Boy Scouts of America is to make 
every boy scout a better citizen. It aims to touch him 
physically — in the camp craft and woodcraft of the outdoor 
life in order that he may have strength in after-days to give 
the best he has to the city and community in which he lives 
as well as to the nation of which he is a part. It seeks to 
develop him by observation and the knowing of things far 
and near, so that later on when he enters business life he 
may be alert and keen and so be able to add to the wealth 
of the nation. It teaches him chivalry and unselfishness, 
duty, charity, thrift, and loyalty, so that no matter what 
should happen in the business, or social, or national life, 
he may always be a true gentleman, seeking to give sym- 
pathy, help, encouragement, and good cheer to those about 
him. It teaches him life-saving in order that he may be 
able in dire accidents and peril by land and sea to know 
just what to do to relieve others of suffering. It teaches 
him endurance in order that he may guard his health by 
being temperate, eating pure food, keeping himself clean, 
so that being possessed of good health he may be always 

^ Handbook for Boys, pp. v, xii. 



6o The Church School or Citizenship 

ready to serve his country in the hour of her need. It 
teaches him patriotism by telling him about the country 
he lives in, her history, her army and navy, in order that he 
may become a good citizen and do those things which every 
citizen ought to do to make the community and land that 
he lives in the best community and land in the world. 

Good citizenship means to the boy scout not merely the 
doing of things which he ought to do when he becomes a 
man, such as voting, keeping the law, and paying his taxes, 
but the looking for opportunities to do good turns by 
safeguarding the interests of the community and by the 
giving of himself in unselfish service to the town or city 
and even the nation of which he is a part. It means that 
he will seek public office when the public office needs him. 
It means that he will stand for the equal opportunity and 
justice which the Declaration of Independence and Con- 
stitution guarantee. It means that in every duty of life 
he may be on the right side and loyal to the best interests 
of the state and nation. By the "good turn" that he does 
daily as a boy scout he is training himself for the unselfish 
service that our cities and land need so much.^ 

So successful has the movement been in carrying 
out these aims with its two hundred thousand 
members in this country that Congress has granted 
it a federal charter of incorporation and the 
United States government receives its reports 
annually and has intrusted the boys with large and 
serious duties in the sale of Liberty Bonds, in coast 
patrolj conservation, and food production, and in 
many other ways. Prominent educators such as 
President Emeritus Eliot and President Lowell, of 

^ Handbook for Boys, pp. ii, 12. 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 6i 

Harvard, Dean Russell, of Columbia, President 
Hadley, of Yale, and many others have given it 
hearty indorsement, while among its officers and 
outspoken in its behalf will be found such statesmen 
as Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Secretary Baker, and 
Major-General Wood. 

Of the scout troops 20 per cent will be found in 
communities of less than 1,000 population, 5,102 
troops are connected with religious organizations, 
and there are 2,000 clergymen serving as scout 
masters. For the year 1916 the administrative 
expense was $135,484.67 and there were 54,345 
men over twenty-one years of age rendering 
voluntary service. Of these, 8,970 were scout 
masters. The local councils are composed of 
leaders in business, religion, and education. Mem- 
bership in the governing body of the Boy Scouts of 
America is restricted to citizens of the United 
States. 

The attitude of the movement toward religion is 
not merely passive and tolerant. While encour- 
aging loyalty to one's religious group, whether 
Jewish, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, it at the 
same time specifically enforces the importance of 
the religious element in the training of the boy. 
Men who are to receive certificates of leadership 
in carrying out the scout program must subscribe 
to the provision in the Constitution, By-Laws, and 
Scout Oath '^specifically recognizing an obligation 



62 The Church School of Citizenship 

to God as the ruling and leading power in the 
universe." At the same time the movement is 
absolutely non-sectarian. 

The scout oath is as follows: 

On my honor I will do my best : 

1. To do my duty to God and my country, and to obey 
the scout law. 

2. To help other people at all times. 

3. To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, 
and morally straight. 

The scout law states: 

1. A scout is trustworthy. A scout's honor is to be 
trusted. If he were to violate his honor by telling a lie, 
or by cheating, or by not doing exactly a given task, when 
trusted on his honor, he may be directed to hand over his 
scout badge. 

2. A scout is loyaL He is loyal to all to whom loyalty is 
due: his scout leader, his home, and parents and country. 

3. A scout is helpful. He must be prepared at any 
time to save life, help injured persons, and share the 
home duties. He must do at least one good turn to somebody 
every day.^ 

4. A scout is friendly. He is a friend to all and a brother 
to every other scout. 

5. A scout is courteous. He is polite to all, especially to 
women, children, old people, and the weak and helpless. 
He must not take pay for being helpful or courteous. 

6. A scout is kind. He is a friend to animals. He will 
not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, but will 
strive to save and protect all harmless life. 

7. A scout is obedient. He obeys his parents, scout 
master, patrol leader, and all other duly constituted author- 
ities. 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 63 

8. A scout is cheerful. He smiles whenever he can. His 
obedience to orders is prompt and cheery. He never shirks 
nor grumbles at hardships. 

9. A scout is thrifty. He does not wantonly destroy 
property. He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes 
the best use of his opportunities. He saves his money so 
that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, 
and helpful to worthy objects. He may work for pay but 
must not receive tips for courtesies or good turns. 

10. A scout is brave. He has the courage to face danger 
in spite of fear and to stand up for the right against the 
coaxings of friends or the jeers or threats of enemies, and 
defeat does not down him. 

11. ^ scout is clean. He keeps clean in body and 
thought, stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, 
and travels with a clean crowd. 

12. A scout is reverent. He is reverent toward God. He 
is faithful in his religious duties and respects the convictions 
of others in matters of custom and religion.^ 

It is not necessary to go into the details of organ- 
ization here or to indicate how these ideals are 
implanted in the neuro-muscular system of the 
boy by performance. In fact, all is action. There 
is not a ^^preachy" thing in the system. Merit is 
objective, and of the fifty-eight classes of activity 
in which merit badges may be won all have civic 
value, but more noticeably agriculture, architec- 
ture, art, athletics, aviation, bird-study, bugling, 
camping, civics, conservation, craftsmanship, fire- 
manship, first aid, forestry, gardening, interpreting, 

^Handbook for Boys, pp. 32-34. 



64 The Church School of Citizenship 

life-saving, marksmanship, pathfinding, personal 
health, pioneering, public health, safety first, 
signaling, and surveying. In 1916, 14,947 merit 
badges were awarded. This fact, however, is no 
adequate measure of the effect of scouting on the 
boyhood of the country. The whole fraternity 
and a large number of boys not included in the 
membership feel the pull of wholesome civic ideals 
and engage in the fascinating program. 

Reports constantly coming in from commu- 
nities all over the land show wonderful activity 
in clean-up campaigns, animal protection, aiding 
police, assisting the Red Cross, rescuing the drown- 
ing, exterminating flies and mosquitoes, fire preven- 
tion, and neighborhood surveys. In connection 
with the fiftieth annual encampment of the G.A.R. 
at Kansas City, Missouri, the following resolu- 
tion was passed: 

Whereas, The organization of Boy Scouts has rendered 
a unique and useful service to the G.A.R. on the occasion 
of the fiftieth encampment; therefore be it 

Resolved, That a proper recognition of the service be 
made and that the commander-in-chief be authorized to 
appoint a committee of three who shall have power to select 
and secure appropriate medals for presentation to the Boy 
Scouts of Kansas City in grateful appreciation of their 
efficient service. 

Incidentally the movement is enlisting the 
finest type of business and professional men in 
giving a very personal form of social service and in 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 65 

rendering such aid to the nation as has not been 
commonly the practice of our most efficient men. 
The reflex benefi.t to the manhood engaged in this 
remarkable work with boys is not the least of its 
assets. 

In addition to the bonds which bind this great 
army of boys together, such as motto, badges, uni- 
form, oath, and law, there is an unexcelled boys' 
magazine known as Boys' Life, having a monthly 
circulation of 100,000 copies. Taken all in all the 
church school that intends to teach citizenship 
could not ask any better device for its twelve- 
to fifteen-year-old boys than the Boy Scouts of 
America. 

The scout's observations, which tend to become 
remarkably keen and accurate, and his under- 
takings in all phases of good citizenship will 
furnish better material for class use than any text- 
book, and the realities of right living will come home 
with great force when taken from the very texture 
of life in the making. The teacher who has been 
the story-teller at the camp fire and the respon- 
sible director in duties that must be exactly done, 
not only will be free from disciplinary problems 
in the class session, but will be the trusted sponsor 
for all of those heroes, biblical and secular, who 
fire the soul of youth with nobility and high 
resolve. The canon of biography for religious 
education on its civic side must be kept open, and 



66 The Chuech School of Citizenship 

the real leader will introduce the boys to great 
citizens both of the long ago and of today.^ For 
adventure reading of the right sort and for informa- 
tion on craft technique the volumes constituting 
Every Boy's Library, published by the Boy Scouts 
of America, are excellent. 

Since such a movement is now well established 
and heartily indorsed by those most interested in 
good citizenship, since it is entirely friendly to the 
church and offers methods of work with boys that 
no individual church could otherwise devise and 
carry out, might not the church school of citizen- 
ship require all of its boys in the twelfth- to 
fifteenth-year period to take scouting in regular 
course? And in pursuance of this plan would 
it not be well for the church to select for training 
and commission as scout masters a corps of her 
finest young men ? The most serious problem at 
present confronting this greatest single movement 
for good citizenship in the United States is that 
of securing enough trained scout masters of the 
required age and of the right moral stamp. The 
church should supply men not only for her own 
needs but for those of the entire community. 
This is clearly part of her civic duty. 

For the girls of this period a similarly whole- 
some movement has been begun in the organization 
of the Camp Fire Girls. Possibly the restrictions 

^ See list at end of this chapter. 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 67 

of the past with the less obvious need of training 
girls for citizenship, and the fact that they are less 
gregarious and democratic than boys, has made the 
movement somewhat more modest in scope than 
that of the Boy Scouts of America. The camp 
fire movement, however, while observing the 
differentiation that should obtain in the training 
of boys and girls respectively, has done more than 
any other organized effort to restore to girls the 
paradise of the open country and to interpret in 
terms of beauty and service a woman's duty to 
home and community. 

The Camp Fire Girls now number upward of 
100,000 and are increasing at the rate of about 
3,000 new members per month. This organiza- 
tion, like that of the scouts, gets its chief civic 
value in organizing and standardizing conduct in 
the home and in society. The value of such an 
institution, which is both a dynamo for good 
deeds and a court for their recognition, is almost 
inestimable. The lamentable efforts of school 
methods, which have become almost wholly 
ideational and physically passive, are offset by a 
vigorous action program attached to the full round 
of the child's daily life. 

Space does not permit a full description of the 
organization and ritual of the Camp Fire Girls. 
Each group is composed of six or more girls over 
twelve years of age, with a guardian who must be 



68 The Church School of Citizenship 

at least eighteen years old. The symbolism is 
built up about fire as the mystic center of home life 
and the camp as typical of free life and com- 
petency in the great out-of-doors. The watch- 
word, ^'Wohelo/' is a composite of work, health, 
and love, which describe the three cardinal aims 
of the order. There are three progressive classes 
of members: Wood Gatherer, Fire Maker, and 
Torch Bearer. The applicant for admission to the 
order, beginning with the class of Wood Gatherer, 
declares her desire to obey the law of the camp 
fire, which is ^'to seek beauty, give service, pursue 
knowledge, be trustworthy, hold on to health, glorify 
work, be happy.^^ If in the course of two months 
she has performed the seven specified requirements 
she is admitted and given the camp fire ring to 
wear. At thirteen she may apply for admission 
to the Fire Maker class, stating the following ideal 
as her desire: ^'As fuel is brought to the fire, so I 
purpose to bring my strength, my ambition, my 
hearths desire, my joy, and my sorrow to the fire of 
human kind. For I will tend as my fathers have 
tended, and my father^ s fathers, since time began, 
the fire that is called the love of man for man, the love 
of man for God^ A score or more of elective 
honors showing very practical and worthy achieve- 
ment must have been secured before admission 
will be granted. At fifteen, if the girl has won 
sufficient honors and has shown powers of steady 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 69 

leadership qualifying her as an assistant to the 
guardian, she may become a torch bearer. Her 
statement of purpose is: '^ That light which has been 
given to me I desire to pass undimmed to others ^ 

Honors are granted in seven departments as 
follows: Home Craft, Health Craft, Camp Craft, 
Hand Craft, Nature Lore, Business, Patriotism. 
The book of the Camp Fire Girls lists some three 
hundred and fifty of these practical accomplish- 
ments by which the member may secure promotion. 
A few, selected at random, are as follows : 

Make bread in two ways, and two kinds of cake. 

Gather two quarts of wild berries or fruits and make them 
into a dessert. 

Pick, dress, and cook a fowl. 

Air and make one bed a day for two months. 

Sleep out of doors or with wide-open windows for two 
consecutive months between October and April. 

Swim one hundred yards. 

Walk forty miles in any ten days. 

Make a dress. 

Identify and describe twenty wild birds. 

Raise a crop of sweet corn, pop corn, or potatoes. 

Save 10 per cent of your allowance for three months. 

Describe the work of three organizations interested in 
labor conditions of women. 

Prepare plans designed to improve the conditions under 
which girls work in your commimity. 

Dr. Luther H. Gulick, the president of the 
organization, says, ^Xamp Fire Girls exist pri- 
marily to serve the community — all of it, boys 



^o The Church School of Citizenship 

and girls, men and women — by means of that 
'applied personal affection' which is their field of 
chief superiority/' and, ''This is the patriotism 
of Camp Fire Girls: to serve their country and 
their times by consecrating to it the most precious 
quality of womanhood; to bring about more 
sympathy and love in the world; to make daily 
living more wholesome and happy and large; to 
convert temptation toward evil into opportunity 
for righteousness." 

The organization has enlisted its membership 
in food conservation and in various forms of war 
aid and is highly commended by President Wilson. 
The church school of citizenship could do nothing 
better for the civic training of girls in this period 
than to require camp fire membership and to recom- 
mend its choicest young women for appointment 
as guardians. 

In view of the fact that at the age of fourteen 
boys and girls may leave school and go to work, 
and of the certainty that very many will be 
employed at sixteen years of age, it would be well 
to give some attention to the vocational interest 
in the period under consideration. While the 
assumption that young people of this age are 
socially competent is indefensible and the economic 
policy that thrusts them into industry is unprofit- 
able, yet the church, while working for larger 
reforms, must strive to conserve the character 



Civic Training por Early Adolescence 71 

value and civic worth of those who are prematurely 
drafted for the world's work. 

So very much depends upon the selection of a 
suitable type of work and upon physical and moral 
safety in the place of employment, and so many 
can be kept in school for better equipment if only 
wise counsel and personal help are given, that the 
subject can hardly be avoided in a class that claims 
to deal with life. The investment of a life is a 
sufficiently sacred matter to the individual and a 
sufl&ciently important concern to the state that 
the church school need make no apology for its 
consideration. 

For society's highest welfare both girls and 
boys should plan and prepare for self-support and 
economic independence. Representative leaders 
in the various occupations open to young men and 
young women should be invited to address their 
respective classes for the purpose of interpreting 
at least the standard forms of work available in 
the community, or possibly in the country at large. 
For the most part these young persons know neither 
themselves nor the available positions in any ade- 
quate way; and as for the social significance or 
Christian service inhering in the various trades 
and professions, no very sympathetic or illuminat- 
ing analysis has ever been made. Christian 
representatives from the inside can perhaps 
supply the rising generation with those ideals 



72 The Church School of Citizenship 

which, although hitherto slender and overgrown 
by ^^ business first'' and rank industrialism, must 
yet prevail if democracy is to progress from a 
shibboleth to the full emancipation of life. 

It may be that some of these rash young idealists 
will really believe that life is greater than wealth 
and will in time make those demonstrations of 
equity and brotherly love which will do more to 
Christianize the world of affairs than the preaching 
of many sermons. Nothing could be more fatal 
for good citizenship than that these beginners 
should enter into work, or finally attain position, 
with only that gloss of religion which guarantees 
respectability and without the revolutionary pur- 
pose of Jesus. 

It will be somewhat easier to clarify the civic 
aspects of the standard professions than to socialize 
industry and business. Law, medicine, teaching, 
preaching, and journalism are more readily con- 
ceived as public service, and a relatively large 
number of church young people will be so protected 
from the economic demand that they may take 
time to prepare for one or another of these profes- 
sions. To learn something of the exact nature of 
these ^'callings" and to consider them as ways of 
serving the public, to study their codes of honor 
and to become acquainted with a first-rate Chris- 
tian representative of each may be a great aid in 
awakening a vocational interest and in giving it 
intelligent direction when awakened. 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 73 

For the industrial, commercial, and professional 
fields alike the teacher will do well to conduct class 
visits to the plants, stores, offices, hospitals, courts, 
and other places where the various forms of work 
are in process. It is a good plan also to have each 
pupil make an honest inventory of himself some- 
what after the pattern to be found in Parsons' 
Choosing a Vocation or that of the ^^Find Yourself 
Campaign" of the Y.M.C.A. The real question 
is not, ^'How can I make money?" but, ^^How can 
I best serve my fellow-men ?" 

In addition to such an inventory each pupil 
might make out a personal-expense account show- 
ing his cost to society to date and his return thereon. 
This is fascinating and often produces new moral 
attitudes that make for good citizenship. When 
the youth realizes from his own calculation what 
portion of society's wealth he has used up in food, 
clothing, education, medical care, recreation, and 
in all the service rendered him, he is much more 
likely to resolve upon the only self-respecting 
course open to him — that of giving a full return 
for value received. The avenues of this contribu- 
tion, such as family, school, city, state, and 
nation, become more real to him, and the real 
character of the slacker or grafter who is content 
to receive these benefits without gratitude and 
the full purpose and effort to bring a return with 
profit to the society that has nurtured him is clearly 
seen. 



74 The Church School of Citizenship 

The importance of bringing home this lesson of 
costs cannot be overemphasized, for the disposition 
to take all the benefits of society for granted and 
to consider one's future wholly one's own affair is 
very marked in American life. The ingrate can- 
not become a good citizen. Moreover, such a 
canvass brings into moral review one's personal 
budget, revealing any tendencies toward extrava- 
gance and curbing the indulgence in luxury at 
other people's expense. The good citizen must 
be a producer of some form of wealth, material or 
spiritual, in excess of society's expenditure on him. 

The class should also be encouraged in a wide 
range of observation and experiment in civic 
affairs, with descriptions and reports that afford 
material for class discussion. All that can be 
learned relative to the commimity's health depart- 
ment, water supply, housing, fire department, 
court system, taxation, streets, police, etc., should 
be brought in for discussion under the general idea 
of what kind of a community we should have if 
it were entirely Christian. Experience has shown 
that the boys in particular will respond to a study 
of the police and fire departments, and in addition 
to detailed information about the systems will 
delight in writing up the heroes of the force. We 
have reached the time when there is just as much 
that interests the girls in other departments of 
local government and when in preparation for 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 75 

their place in women's clubs and as fully quali- 
fied citizens their training is considered of equal 
importance. 

This is the age for group g^mes, and probably 
interest and participation in athletic contests are 
now at their height. A little later there will be 
less time for play, and the more serious concerns 
of life will be claiming more attention. In addi- 
tion to work or vocational preparation social inter- 
est between the sexes will be breaking up the gang 
formations of this period. Much, therefore, should 
be made of the solid group formation of the athletic 
team in order that the cardinal virtues of successful 
group behavior may become second nature. 

The organized game is probably the most social 
and adaptable means of laying the civic foundations 
of square dealing, strenuous effort, decision, and 
self-control. The church school that has no con- 
cern for the play life of these boys and girls is for- 
feiting half of its civic opportimity so far as they 
are concerned. To be ignorant of the behavior of 
one's pupils in the great excitement and character- 
revealing tests of organized athletics is much the 
same as for a blind man to practice marksmanship. 
Sometimes your most accommodating and suave 
class member is the object of scorn and a discredit 
to religion because his associates, having seen his 
moral nature stripped in play, know him for what 
he is. 



76 The Church School of Citizenship 

First among the civic benefits of play is the safe 
discharge of the surplus energy and hilarity which 
otherwise register against the peace and order 
of society. The wave movement of young life 
with foaming crests of enthusiasm and troughs of 
despond is pretty well known, and the value of 
play consists in offering wholesome impact for the 
surge of life, and attractive, objective interest for 
its intermittent ebb. The group effect of this 
swing of youth runs far beyond the individual's 
range. He is caught up, energized, intoxicated. 
Youth amazes itself as well as the commimity by 
what it will do collectively every now and again 
through sheer animal spirits. Such occasions as 
the Fourth of July, Halloween, New Year's Eve, 
and even Saturday night may result in very bad 
civic conduct if adequate provision to meet these 
situations has not been made in organized recrea- 
tion and play. Later on the misdirected spree 
proclivities will find expression in debauch, and he 
who has been imeducated in the use of leisure will 
contribute more to the saloon than to his home and 
neighborhood. 

Another civic value of an adequate play program 
is the creation of aggressive virtue. So much good- 
ness lacks power of attack. It plays safe, avoids 
scandal, keeps out of jail, and is distinguished by 
what it does not do. Strenuous games promote 
athletic goodness, an appreciation of issues, and a 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 77 

disposition to fight hard in a good cause. They 
who have fought it out so often in the field of sport, 
who have done their best against whatever odds, 
will, other things being equal, make the best 
citizens. They put effort in place of fatalism, and 
self-expenditure over against the onset of evil. 

Play also teaches abandon, the ability to deliver 
one's self heartily and wholly in a given direction. 
It is a great thing for a community or nation to 
have citizens of this sort. So many public move- 
ments, clearly beneficial, languish for want of that 
out-and-out support which is the psychology of 
public success; and situations which are very 
dangerous for those who dally with them are 
resolved into epochs of advance by those who go 
full steam ahead. A lethargic citizenship along 
with that which, for whatever reason of self- 
concern or intellectual subtleties, cannot take 
firm ground on clear moral issues is a constant 
menace to progressive democracy. 

Closely allied to this phase of civic virtue is the 
power of decision. Every move of the athletic 
game, every new situation created, demands deci- 
sion. Unwavering attention, quick judgment, 
execution — these are the inexorable demands of 
the game. In the good player the whole action 
comes to have the ease and rapidity of a reflex. 
Now it is true that citizenship calls for the reflective 
rather than the emotional judgment of the voter, 



78 The Church School of Citizenship 

but it is equally true that those who watch the 
political game with alertness and whose partisan- 
ship is ardently and steadily with righteousness 
can and do decide their own moves with speed and 
effectiveness. The political trickery with which 
the public is afflicted is sprung before the opposi- 
tion is organized. The alertness of the good citizen 
and of those who seek righteousness in public 
affairs is quite as important as good intentions. 

America cannot pride herself on obedience to 
law. There may be many excuses, such as the 
bewildering multiplicity of laws, the '^foreign 
element," and all that sort of thing, but the fact 
remains that we are a notably lawless people. We 
have lawless children who develop into lawless 
citizens, and the native-born are among the worst. 
Prompt obedience is almost an unknown experience 
to many boys and girls. Sometimes despairing 
parents try boarding or military schools, and those 
who have no means try the juvenile court and the 
reformatory. It would be a good thing if all would 
try the organized game. 

Here is one of these whimsical, indulged, and 
therefore antisocial boys. The slight requirements 
of co-operation in the city home or the for- 
lorn limitations of the slums, the absentee or pre- 
occupied parents, and numberless other reasons 
have deprived him of the old-fashioned discipline 
of obedience. He has had a very soft time in that 



Civic Training foe Early Adolescence 79 

respect. He has found that blufif will work and 
that threats are empty. 

Let us take him into our basket-ball team for 
his and the country's good. Give him the posi- 
tion of guard. Let him wear the uniform and feel 
the pressure of the expectation and judgment of 
his peers in play. If the opposing forward tries 
to pass the ball or to throw a goal it is his business 
to block it. He cannot say ^^I don't feel like it/' 
or trust to luck that his opponent will fail. He 
must be on the spot. He must do his duty. The 
penalty for neglect or for anything less than prompt 
obedience to the demands of the situation is the 
censure of those whose judgment for the time 
being is the only fearful thing that can reach his 
soul. He dare not discredit his team and lose his 
position. The demand upon him makes him 
obedient. With this social pressure upon him 
he goes through the act of prompt obedience thou- 
sands of times and up to the very point of exhaus- 
tion. Indeed he calls up reserves of strength not 
hitherto used in order to render this obedience. 

Is it too great a strain upon faith to believe that 
such drill in social obedience in the consuming 
interest of play may under wise guidance be carried 
over to other social situations where instead of the 
indolent and whimsical citizen and the selfishly 
disobedient ^ we shall have the man who can be 
depended upon to do his duty ? 



8o The Church School of Citizenship 

It is especially desirable also that under party 
government mth its rough-and-tumble campaigns 
we maintain the best features of true sportsman- 
ship. The false idea that one's opponent must be 
not only defeated but also disgraced comes over 
from the neglected and unsuper\dsed play life of 
the community, where what might have been true 
sport under right leadership and standards has 
become the ruthless win-at-any-price encounter 
with all the attendant trickery, bluff, vulgarity, 
profanity, and abuse of the umpire. The civic 
value of play for this age of group games and 
strenuous contests depends wholly upon good 
organization and clean standards. Otherwise the 
ascendancy of the bully favors the might-makes- 
right policy, and meanness and cheating come to 
be adopted as the approved method of getting 
ahead. It is a very important part of the respon- 
sibility of those who will shape citizenship to see 
to it that the community's play is education in 
getting along with opponent and colleague and 
in obedience to the rules. 

Much is being said of loyalty, without which the 
community or nation cannot survive. But next 
to home experience the greatest lessons in loyalty 
are learned in team play. There is some fallacy 
in the doctrine of universal, undifferentiated 
benevolence. It is unfocused, a blank stare into 
infinity. The proving-ground upon which right 
relations with all people must begin needs definite 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 8i 

boundaries. These may be widened with the 
extension of experience, but at first adjustment to 
the concrete group is essential. The team which 
represents church or neighborhood, wears the com- 
mon uniform, subordinates its individual members 
to group achievement, apportions praise or blame, 
and holds together through thick and thin gives 
intensive training in loyalty. 

The assignment of position on the basis of group 
efficiency rather than on that of the player's per- 
sonal glory, and the acceptance of that method, 
develop a loyalty whose cost is keenly felt and 
whose worth is correspondingly real. There can 
be no finer discipline for democracy. To sub- 
stitute the useful for the spectacular, to convert 
personal competition into united group action, to 
do your best for the common cause wherever as- 
signed, to learn that the total effect in such har- 
mony is more than the sum of individual effort, 
and to know that the united body is something 
other and more than its constituent members, that 
it carries over a spirit and power of its own — this 
is insight into the meaning of state and nation. 

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night — 
Ten to make and the match to win — 
A bumping pitch and a blinding light, 
An hour to play and the last man in. 
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat 
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, 
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote: 
"Play up! play up! and play the game ! " 



82 The Church School or Citizenship 

The sand of the desert is sodden red — 
Red with the wreck of a square that broke — 
The Gathng's jammed and the colonel dead 
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. 
The river of death has brimmed his banks 
And England's far, and Honor a name, 
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, 
*^ Play up! play up! and play the game! "^ 

QUESTIONS, INVESTIGATIONS, EXPERIMENTS 

1. Discuss organized play as training for citizenship. 

2. Canvass the vocational interests of your pupils and 
make a report on these interests. 

3. Make a plan for having certain vocations presented 
by competent representatives. 

4. Conduct the experiment of the personal-expense 
budget and keep record of the facts and of the moral 
reactions, if any. 

5. Describe the effects of scouting on boys under your 
own observation. 

6. Do the same for Camp Fire Girls. 

7. Make a list of ten different kinds of ^^good turns" 
reported by your boys. 

8. Do the same for a class of girls. 

9. Ascertain what members of your class use the public 
library and what books they have drawn in the past month. 

10. Keep a record showing how much time per month 
you devote to your pupils outside the actual class session. 

1 1 . Outline a preparatory course for camp fire guardians. 

12. Do the same for scout masters. 

13. Review chapter ii and indicate what activities and 
methods you would carry over into this period. 

' Henry Newbolt, Vitai lampada. 



Civic Training for Early Adolescence 83 

14. Upon the basis of class discussion make a list of 
heroes and heroines that have validity for this age. 

15. Plan some piece of constructive work for the good 
of the class, school, or church, and have it executed by your 
class. Keep a full record of the experiment. 

16. Assign your class to street and sidewalk duty for a 
week. File the individual reports. 

17. Assign waste prevention for a week. File reports. 

18. Assign pubHc safety for a week. File reports. 

19. Explain the emotional instabihty of this adolescent 
period. 

20. Ascertain how many of your pupils expect to finish 
high school. If any intend to drop out, find the reason why. 

21. Devote a given session to outhning the community's 
local government, and at the session next following have the 
pupils write their description of it. Correct and return 
the papers. 

22. Have the children draft a set of rules for the public- 
school playground. 

23. Arrange for a scout and camp fire evening with 
demonstrations of first aid and other specialties by the boys 
and girls. 

READING RECOMMENDED 

rOR THE PUPIL 

Barton, Clara. History of the Red Cross, 
Bloomfield, Hazard, and Lamprey. A Civic Reader for New 
Americans. 

Published for immigrants attending the Boston evening 
schools, but useful alike for our young citizens of American birth. 

Bolton, S. K. Lives of Famous Women {The Children's 

Hour, Vol. VIII). 
Kelly, H. A. Walter Reed and Yellow Fever. 



84 The Church School of Citizenship 

The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (fifth or subsequent 
editions) . 

The Boy Scout Handbook (fifteenth or subsequent editions). 

The entire Macmillan series entitled True Stories of Great 
Americans. These cost but fifty cents per volume, and 
the following volumes have appeared: Columbus, 
Franklin, Boone, Crockett, Penn, Grant, Lincoln, 
Lafayette, LaSalle, Washington, Custer, Lee, Houston, 
John Paul Jones, Captain John Smith, Nathan Hale, 
Fulton, and Edison. 

FOR THE TEACHER 

Barnard, Carrier, Dunn, and Kingsley. The Teaching of 
Community Civics. (United States Bureau of Educa- 
tion Bulletin, 191 5, No. 23) 

Hill, Mabel. The Teaching of Civics. 

Lapp, John A. Our America. 

Scouting (a semimonthly magazine for workers with boys). 

Wohelo (a monthly magazine for girls). 



CHAPTER IV 
CIVIC TRAINING FOR LATER ADOLESCENCE 

Usually at about sixteen years of age young 
people are confronted with the necessity of some 
measure of intellectual reconstruction. Whether 
as a result of their high-school course, then in 
progress, or as a derivative from their early experi- 
ence at work, a certain process of sophistication 
sets in. Authorities hitherto unquestioned are 
curtly challenged, dictation is intolerable, physical 
restraint impossible, and the very axioms of human 
wisdom are wholly debatable. There is danger of 
anarchy, and wherever ideals are rudely shattered 
and childhood's dreams ridiculed the greater dan- 
ger of cynicism is incurred. 

This venture is in the direction of a free and 
independent personality and is a claim for the right 
of private judgment. It looks toward that com- 
petency which citizens in a democracy must have 
and exercise. No good can come from any auto- 
cratic attempt to restrict this freedom of thought 
and to stifle this first philosophic joy of formulating 
for one's self a world-attitude. No matter how 
many beaten paths or prosaic highways pierce the 
forest and cross the mountain, it is well for youth 

85 



86 The Church School of Citizenship 

to have a few strenuous days in the underbrush and 
among the rocks with the charm of discovery and 
self-direction, even if in the end he comes out on 
or very near the traveled road. 

This tendency, mixed as it is with pardonable 
conceit, affords a rich opportunity for civic training. 
It marks the golden age for debate. Social con- 
ceptions, whether of Plato, Spencer, Jefferson, or 
Kossuth, are none too big for these citizens of 
tomorrow; and the problems of our own govern- 
ment, local, national, and international, will be 
taken up with great zest and seriousness. 

It is rather doubtful whether much of benefit 
can be accomplished by attempting to teach the 
exact nature and function of various govern- 
mental bodies prior to this age. Moreover, if 
one takes into account the rank and file of 
yoimg people rather than the small percentage 
who will finish high school and go to college, 
the age of sixteen will appear as a distinct 
division point in youth's journey. It is at about 
that time that employment may profitably be 
undertaken, since most reputable concerns, both 
because of legal restrictions and for the sake of 
business efficiency, do not care to employ younger 
children. 

The church school should keep in mind the fact 
that at this time an increased share of the educa- 
tional burden falls to her, and that the agencies 



Civic Training for Later Adolescence 87 

which will pilot youth from this age to the time of 
full, legal citizenship are few indeed. 

It would be difficult to draw an exact line sepa- 
rating the studies more suitable for adults over 
twenty-one years of age from those adapted to the 
period with which we are now dealing. Wherever 
there is a doubt in the matter one should incline 
toward the earlier use both because of the pupil's 
greater teachableness and because of the fact 
that he is not as yet intrenched in the social ethics 
of our imperfect economic system. Those whose 
business success, profits, and holdings argue for the 
status quo can only with great effort become ardent 
students of fundamental reform. The church 
school of citizenship should aim as far as possible 
to get a righteous verdict from youth prior to that 
unconscious closing of the mind which success and 
prosperity so often bring. 

In view of youth's proclivity for discussion, and 
as testimony to vital interest, it would be well to 
provide for the most earnest of the Simday-school- 
class members and for others who may not attend 
that session some other outlet for their contending 
civic ideas. A regular Saturday night meeting of 
the group as a debating society will produce excel- 
lent results in the most industrious investigation 
of government reports, local conditions bearing 
upon the issue, and standard sources wherever 
found. Now and again a public debate with some 



88 The Church School of Citizenship 

well-known and respected local official presiding 
and prominent persons for judges will stimulate 
the society, develop confidence in public speaking, 
and provide a pleasant social occasion. 

However, the rather common practice of assign- 
ing debaters to their respective sides regardless of 
personal conviction and for drill in argumentation 
is vicious and destroys the civic value of this 
kind of training. It is to be feared that most 
young Americans are already quite proficient in 
bluffing, having had ample practice in school 
recitation — not to mention other instances — so 
that what we need for democracy is not smartness 
but the abiHty to sustain conviction on public 
matters and by fair reasoning to augment a minor- 
ity which is right to a majority which rules. This 
is imperative for social advance, and the mere 
ability to make the worse appear the better argu- 
ment is a tawdry accompHshment and a danger- 
ous civic liabihty. 

A serious consideration of important issues is 
greatly needed by our young people. The pre- 
cocious social pace w^hich they now set and the 
''movie-mind" with its surface titillation which 
they develop justify the fear that the essential dig- 
nity and moral earnestness to be found in grap- 
pling with great questions of civic import will be 
overlooked.' A sort of pleasure ideal, a life of the 
senses, a flitting here and there for manufactured 



Civic Training for Later Adolescence 89 

sensation instead of the sobriety of elemental 
moral issues, seriously threaten our citizenship 
now in the making. Some never so much as 
awaken to any vocational interest until it is too 
late, and very many fail entirely of any glimpse 
of those major questions of public concern which 
have drawn into their wake and illumined such 
characters as Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln. 
To suppose that American youth is decadent might 
only be equivalent to confessing that we ourselves 
are no longer young, but what with the urbanizing 
of so many and the tendency of leaders and teachers 
to underplay or avoid the great moral issues for 
fear of giving offense there is considerable danger 
of superficiahty. 

A ragtime youth with Charlie Chaplin manners 
and Mutt and Jeff mentality gives no great promise 
for the stability of the state. If church young 
people cherish the idea that being up to date and 
competent in such vulgar claptrap is the sign 
manual of the cult of youth and are rather ashamed 
of being posted on, or concerned with, the socio- 
moral issues of the day, what is to be expected of 
those who have had no connection with this agency 
whose very burden and purpose is the establish- 
ment of a perfect social order ? 

The maximum benefit of debate will be realized 
when the questions under discussion parallel the 
topics which are being considered in the Sunday 



go The Church School of Citizenship 

class session. For example, if the class is making 
study of child protection as based on the teaching 
of Jesus and exemplified in community organiza- 
tion and effort, then in the week-night meeting as 
a debating club such questions as the following 
might be threshed out : 

Resolved, That insurance should be compulsory. 

Resolved, That mothers' pensions impede social advance. 

Resolved, That compulsory education should apply to all 
persons under eighteen years of age. 

Resolved, That the community's play should be admin- 
istered as part of the school system. 

Resolved, That minors be prohibited from engaging in any 
of the street trades, etc. 

Therefore, although debate may not be made 
attractive to all the young people, it will have 
great civic value in developing prospective leaders, 
in stimulating the study of public questions, in 
training for public speaking, and in teaching self- 
possession, courtesy, and fairness in discussion. 
Most of all it will turn to good account the 
normal skepticism of this period. 

Another helpful device for later adolescence 
consists in the organization and conduct of govern- 
mental bodies. The class or department may 
become a city council, or board of county com- 
missioners, or a miniature legislature. Organiza- 
tion and procedure must be identical with that of 
these legally constituted bodies, and the policies, 



Civic Training for Later Adolescence 91 

appropriations, and other matters engaging the 
people's representatives should be taken up and 
disposed of after the fashion of responsible agents. 
A great deal of the play spirit will enter into this, 
while at the same time valuable information on 
how the people's business is transacted will be 
obtained. 

One of the most humorous of these combinations 
of play and civic education is the mock trial. No 
difficulty will be experienced in securing a local 
judge or attorney to coach the participants and 
none whatever in securing a full courtroom of 
amused citizens when the trial comes off. Along 
with the fun, wit, and caricature incident to the 
trial the young people will learn something of 
how a court trial is held. Those who have visited 
real courtrooms to any extent will agree that the 
hypothetical dignity of bench and bar will not be 
seriously injured at the hands of these jolly litigants 
and functionaries. 

In some such ways as these and at about this 
time interest in the structural side of government 
may be augmented. The church school can under- 
take only a limited part of the format task of defin- 
ing the methods and purposes of the legislative, 
executive, and judicial departments of govern- 
ment. Public education will have covered the 
ground, but often so far in advance of the child's 
possible interest in such matters that the facts 



92 The Church School of Citizenship 

remain meaningless until enacted in some such way 
as is here proposed for the church group. Per- 
haps Our America,'^ by James A. Lapp, although 
suited to juveniles in some respects, is as good as 
any for this purpose. 

Attention should be given to the use of these 
young people as leaders. Prior to this period they 
have not been qualified and subsequent to it they 
will have less leisure and enthusiasm for such 
service. Probably the maximimi possibilities of 
volunteer effort will be found in these years from 
sixteen to twenty-one. With good supervision an 
immense amount of work can be accomphshed, 
as is evidenced by the young people's societies, 
organized classes, and boys' and girls' clubs, con- 
ducted by those who are in the first flush of respon- 
sible leadership. 

In the organization of music for patriotic service, 
in working up dramatic presentations of national 
themes, and in promoting a community pageant 
these young enthusiasts will be unsurpassed. In 
the matter of the music alone one cannot but regret 
the serious loss to the democratic spirit and to the 
emotional side of group effort that has come from 
the operatic trend within the church. To teach 
all of the children to sing, to bring all of our young 
people through the refining and miifying discipline 
of music, and to have congregations whose spirit 

' Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Co. 



Civic Tila^ining for Later Adolescence 93 

is blended and uplifted in rendering praise is far 
more beneficial to democracy than the common 
practice of paying a few professionals to sing for or 
to us. 

Young people between the ages of sixteen and 
twenty-one can render valuable service in commu- 
nity survey and investigation. Barring the social 
evil, saloons, and public dance halls as fields for 
their endeavor, they can do a great deal in ascer- 
taining the conditions which prevail in nickel 
shows, public playgrounds and bathing beaches, 
amusement parks, and poolrooms. They will 
need wise leadership on the part of someone who 
knows the channels through which the informa- 
tion should be cleared, and will need to be indi- 
vidually restrained so that any action taken will 
be after deliberation and agreement on the part of 
the leaders and the whole group. 

In most cities the complaints of individuals 
about abuses practiced by money-making amuse- 
ments are lightly regarded by callous ofiicials, so 
that it becomes necessary both to be very certain 
of the facts and to bring complaint through the 
recognized organization working on the prob- 
lem in question. Resolutions, sweeping accusa- 
tions, and publicity first are to be carefully avoided. 
Subsequent inspection to ascertain whether the 
improvement forced or promised is maintained is 
quite as important as the initial discovery. One 



94 The Church School of Citizenship 

of the most prevalent errors of young reformers is 
the idea that social gains once made are permanent, 
and it may be said that in social action the church 
is generally spasmodic and needs to steady down 
to that eternal vigilance which is the price of 
liberty. 

Parish surveys to give the locations and dimen- 
sions of the constructive and destructive agencies, 
the principal industries, the schools, libraries, 
playgrounds, hospitals, churches, clubs, saloons, 
theaters, dance halls, and poolrooms will have some 
value in visualizing the church's task, and along 
with investigation will give a more vivid idea of 
the magnitude of the struggle in which the young 
person is enlisted. 

However, it is a mistake to allow these young 
people to do slumming, which is usually actuated 
by curiosity rather than by the desire or ability to 
render aid, and as for visiting indiscriminately to 
ask all manner of questions of the poor — one feels 
that the poor are already suflSciently afflicted. It 
is better that certain dependent families already 
under the care of the church, or such as may be 
designated by the charity worker, be adopted 
by the organized class with the purpose to stand by 
and minister until they are again on their feet. 
Unless such work is taken up in some systematic 
and permanent way the sending of visitors hither 
and thither, sometimes only to get material for a 



Civic Training for Later Adolescence 95 

paper or speech or to indulge in sentimentalism, 
will be mistaken for social service. Some church 
people seem to think that even the young children 
of the Sunday school should visit the needy homes 
and should report to the class or to the whole school 
what they see and do ; but the soundness of such a 
policy, considered either as relief or as moral 
education, is to be seriously questioned. 

One of the best ways for the young people to 
become acquainted with these problems in a legiti- 
mate, helpful way is by voluntary service in social 
settlements and with the established agencies of 
the city. By virtue of group leadership and the 
friendship developed therein and under the super- 
vision of trained workers the further task of 
pushing back into the home may be more deli- 
cately and intelligently performed. Young people 
should not be turned loose in the very vague 
and much-lauded field of social service with the 
thought that they will either derive or render 
much good unless properly organized and well 
directed. 

A current-events club so organized as to secure 
official pamphlets and government reports and 
based on the weekly news reviews of the stand- 
ard magazines might have considerable value for 
civic training. It could build up a library of 
information on the momentous affairs of the 
hour and would stimulate profitable reading. The 



96 The Church School of Citizenship 

underwritten premise of all such work is the 
attempt to relate individual and collective conduct 
to the ideals of Jesus. 

In connection with current problems it would 
be well to invite speakers of exceptional informa- 
tion and standing, so that the inner difl&culties, 
usually unknowTL to inexperienced young people, 
might be sjmpathetically appreciated. Personal 
observation and report on the part of club mem- 
bers should be encouraged. 

Biography is still in place. It can be more 
thorough and philosophic than for the preceding 
period. Possibly the life of the Earl of Shaftes- 
bury throws more light on the social gains of the 
nineteenth century than any other biography. 
It also grips the imagination of youth and shows 
the nature of the task of a Christian statesman. 
In the preceding period the biography will have 
more to do mth the conquest of nature, in this it 
wi\l rather emphasize society's struggle for human 
rights. 

As the young people near their majority much 
should be made of preparation for the franchise. 
The present general neglect of this phase of civic 
education must give place to conscientious and 
thorough training. Great values are lost and 
democracy is endangered by allowing our young 
people simply to drift into possession of our only 
recognized form of sovereign power, the vote. 



Civic Training for Later Adolescence 97 

We have the right and duty of training our sover- 
eign. He is as good or as bad, as intelligent or as 
stupid, as we make him. The outcry against the 
inejficiency or crookedness of the government is 
never more than an indictment of ourselves; and 
we should be reminded in passing that the average 
of honor and faithfulness in public life is on a par 
with that foimd in domestic or business life. Pub- 
lic servants are but samples of what we really are, 
and they are servants of our choosing. 

The concern which from now on will be given 
to fitting the foreign-bom for American citizen- 
ship needs to be applied equally to all who are about 
to enter that great partnership which constitutes 
the republic. Enfranchisement should be made a 
spiritual experience. To receive this responsi- 
bility thoughtlessly and without preparation, or 
with the small party politician as tutor and personal 
gain as reward for party loyalty, is nothing short 
of a calamity. The industry of the precinct com- 
mitteeman in rounding up the new vote must be 
excelled by those who will deliver to the state a 
free and intelligent citizen. 

The vast expenditures for public education and 
the total expense of society in bringing her wards 
to their majority, with all the accumulated advan- 
tages that constitute American civilization, forbid 
turning over the keys of the citadel to the thought- 
less or selfish. Since young people who are about 



98 The Church School or Citizenship 

to enter citizenship have been for some time 
beyond the reach of public education, it becomes 
the more important that voluntary agencies do 
all they can to supplement the earlier school train- 
ing, to illumine and solemnize the goal that ends 
dependency and marks full citizenship, and to 
hasten the time when the state will pay more 
attention to this phase of education so vital to her 
well-being. 

Among the voluntary agencies which must, for 
the present, try to meet the need there is none 
more promising than the church. Her presence 
in every commimity and the essentially religious 
nature of the experience by which one's life is 
bound into the legal solidarity of the body politic 
qualify her pre-eminently for this educational 
task. 

Naturally all that the church school has done 
in civic education through the successive grades 
will count toward the crowning experience, the 
commencement day, when with her full blessing 
and suitable ceremony her youth will be formally 
given to the service of the state. As immediate 
preparation for this event there should be a first- 
voters' class to include all persons twenty years 
of age, and miless their number is sufficient to 
warrant a separate class all those who are pre- 
paring for naturalization. Such studies as throw 
light on the long struggle for religious liberty. 



Civic Training for. Later Adolescence 99 

common rights, and universal franchise should 
be taken up, together with the very important 
matter of the existing election laws and the exact 
method of registering and voting. Probably a 
study of taxation might also be made, so that 
the financial nature of the partnership about to 
be assumed might be seriously accepted. 

As a climax to all that has been done in the 
lower grades and in this special class it would be 
well to hold a religious service, say early in Novem- 
ber of each year, in which all who had come into 
their franchise during the year would receive public 
recognition and the spiritual support of such an 
address and such a ceremony as would gird them 
for the full and noble discharge of their duties. 
In the same week some social celebration of the 
occasion might be given by one or another of the 
societies of the church. 

If in some such ways as these the idealism and 
loyalty of youth can be confirmed in noble citizen- 
ship it will not be long before our public life will 
show an upward trend. Furthermore it is to be 
expected that such an instruction in Christian 
citizenship will tend to retain in the membership 
of the church school many who would otherwise 
drop out. A vital curriculum which gives orderly 
consideration to the elements of social living and 
grapples with the very problems at hand will not 
be spurned by these alert young people. 



loo The Church School of Citizenship 

QUESTIONS, INVESTIGATIONS, EXPERIMENTS 

1. Make a record of the skeptical tendencies which you 
have actually observed in young people sixteen and seven- 
teen years of age. 

2. Compare young men and young women in this respect. 

3. Make plans in full for five debates on civic questions. 

4. Indicate why the church school carries an extra 
responsibility for young people from sixteen to twenty-one 
years of age. 

5. Make a list of the available public officials of high 
character whom you might secure to address your class. 

6. Make a similar list of social workers. 

7. Ascertain all the forms of social or public service being 
rendered by members of your class and post the information 
in suitable fashion. 

8. Outline a program of social occasions for the organized 
class or classes or for the young people's society. 

9. Rate your pupils in the order of what seems to be 
their power of leadership. 

10. Discover if possible the most cherished ambition of 
each member of your class. 

1 1 . Undertake the experiment of a mock trial and report 
in full to the teachers' study-group. 

12. What serious reading have your pupils done during 
the past month ? 

13. What advice would you give your pupils regarding 
the plays now showing in your community ? 

14. Prepare and present for criticism a lesson on " School 
Teaching as Public Service.'' 

15. Do the same for Y.M.C.A. work. 

16. For Y.W.C.A. work. . 

17. For the ministry. 

18. For nursing. 



Civic Training for Later, Adolescence ioi 

19. For organized charities. 

20. For one or all of the departments of your city 
government. 

21. What should a community survey conducted by 
volunteer young people be expected to cover ? 

22. Enumerate the facihties for wholesome social inter- 
course between young men and young women in your com- 
munity. 

23. Discuss the relative merits of the following period- 
icals as text for a current-events club: the Outlook, the 
Independent, the Literary Digest, the New Republic. 

24. What minimum of civic knowledge would you require 
for enfranchisement ? 

25. What should an oath or statement of purpose on 
receipt of the franchise include ? 

26. Prepare a recognition service for first voters. 

27. What service is your class rendering the foreign- 
born ? What service could it render ? 

28. How many young women in your church are camp 
fire guardians ? 

29. How many young men in your church are training 
to become scout masters at twenty-one years of age ? 

30. What average net expense to society do the members 
of your class represent ? 

3 1 . Outline a plan whereby representatives of the various 
departments of your city government may inform the 
church young people as to the respective functions of each 
of these departments. 

32. What reports, city, county, state, and federal, are 
in your Sunday-school library ? 

33. What degree of co-operation is practiced between 
your Sunday-school and the public library ? 

34. What co-operation exists between your secondary 
department and the public high school ? 



I02 The Church School of Citizenship 



READING RECOMMENDED 

Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. 

. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 

Ashley, R. L. The New Civics. 

Ash worth, R. A. The Union of Christian Forces. 

Bulletins of the American Unitarian Association. 

Gillette, G. M. The Family and Society. 

Henderson, C. R. Social Duties from the Christian Point 

of View. 

. The Cause and Cure of Crime. 

Hodder, Edwin. Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of 

Shaftesbury. 
Jenks, J. W. The Political and Social Significance of the 

Life and Teachings of Jesus. 
Johnson, F. W. The Problems of Boyhood. 
Kent and Jenks. The Making of a Nation. 

. The Testing of a Nation^ s Ideals. 

Lessons in Community and National Life. United States 

Bureau of Education, Section A, Lessons i, 3, 5, 6, 

and 7. 
Rauschenbusch, W. The Social Principles of Jesus. 
Soares, T. G. The Social Institutions and Ideals of the Bible. 
Strong, Josiah. The Challenge of the City. 
Studies in Social Progress. The monthly publication of the 

American Institute of Social Service. 
Tillebrown, C. R. Taxation. 
Ward, Harry F. Social Creed of the Churches. 

. The Church and Social Service. 

Wright, H. C. The American City. 



CHAPTER V 
CIVICS IN THE RURAL CHURCH SCHOOL 

While many of the suggestions offered in the 
preceding chapters are as appHcable to the rural 
as to the city situation, nevertheless it is the latter 
that has been most in mind. Consequently it may 
not be amiss to give separate attention to the civic 
possibilities of the rural church school. 

If the country districts are to have capable and 
enlightened leaders they must be furnished from 
among country people. Any attempt of the out- 
sider who thinks of farm people as a separate 
species and who imagines that certain benefits 
should be imposed upon them is bound to fail. It 
is far better to work from within and to beheve 
that those who are industrious, capable, sane, and 
increasingly well-to-do can both develop leadership 
and finance their own progress. 

The boys and girls who are now on the farms 
should be the leaders of tomorrow. They are 
already furnished with the very thought-forms of 
farm life^ They know the values that have grown 
up in terms of crops, weather, roads, stock, and 
what not, and they are in the midst of a wonderful 
transformation that is supplanting mere drudgery 

103 



I04 The Church School of Citizenship 

with fulness of life. Very many of these boys and 
girls are to be found in the little Sunday schools that 
dot almost every township and are the original and 
most prevalent social centers of rural life. 

The basal conception of the church's function 
will determine what she may undertake for rural 
citizenship. If she is to carry no obligation and 
exert no conscious influence beyond the few 
activities of her own organization as such, then her 
civic value will be correspondingly slight. But if 
she is the champion of all that makes for abundant 
life and is eager for the realization of the Kingdom 
of God through all the co-operating agencies which 
serve, or may serve, that purpose, then she will 
be free from all jealousy of school and grange, 
lodge and club, and will seek earnestly to bring 
them to their highest excellence in the service of 
the people. 

The tendency to make the school the social 
center is very reasonable and logical, and if people 
of various nationalities and faiths can best express 
their democratic unity there, then the church will 
exert her full strength to secure civic gains through 
that avenue. There is no platform upon which 
all may stand in hearty unison like that of good 
citizenship. It is the best mobilization ground for 
moral advance, and the church sins against herself 
and society whenever she deliberately ignores this 
opportimity. 



Civics in the Rural Church School 105 

The strategic advantage of the church, however, 
in providing rural leadership is little appreciated. 
Yet by comparison with the school teacher the 
country pastor ranks very well in education, out- 
look upon the world, experience, aim, and tenure 
of position. Historically the country church and 
Sunday school have filled the place of social center 
for the countryside rather better than any other 
institution. Imperfect and halting as church 
leadership is by lack of community-wide ideals 
and by sectarian division, nevertheless it is to be 
doubted whether at any place in the social struc- 
ture of America ability of the same order as that 
of the coimtry minister is being retained at so little 
cost. 

What village or settlement established by the 
westward trend of population does not bear testi- 
mony to these imnamed outriders of civilization ? 
They sleep beside the pioneers, the Indian fighters, 
and the cowboys, but what they did remains as 
a social inheritance of untold value. Now that the 
life of village and settlement has become more 
static, may we not hope that their successors, who 
still love God's open country and the plain folk of 
the farm, will measure up to the old leadership and 
serve their day in the same spirit ? 

One of the first duties of the church school is to 
make the children aware of their great good fortune 
in being in the country, and a second is to make 



io6 The Church School or Citizenship 

them aware of what the country really is. There 
is no reason why they should feel in any respect 
less fortunate than their city cousins. Let them 
canvass their situation and make a statement of 
why they are glad to live in the country. The 
cheap delusion that happiness and life are identical 
with the glare and clamor of cities needs to be 
dispelled from the start. From the first the chil- 
dren of the country should be its advocates. 
Legitimate pride of this sort, based on values that 
are not fictitious, is a factor in good citizenship. 

It is equally important that the country chil- 
dren be taught to observe closely the good things 
that lie all about them. The tragedy of some 
country folk is their blindness. Spend some of 
the class-period in listening to the children's 
accounts of what they saw on the way to school. 
Flowers, trees, birds, crops, cattle, buildings, roads, 
weather conditions, yards, machinery, fences, 
brooks, bridges, telephone posts and wires, motors, 
insects, and every item of the child's environment 
when actually observed become material for 
religious education and civic training in the care 
and upkeep of the countryside. In the degree in 
which the country child is aware of his surround- 
ings, in that degree is he already religious. 

The invitation of the rural environment to 
improve pedagogy by the direct use of the source 
material of education is almost irresistible, and its 



Civics in the Rural Church School 107 

frank acceptance would bring both teacher and 
pupil more nearly into the Master's way of living 
and teaching. Moreover the biblical literature 
as a whole is so distinctly rural that many com- 
parisons and interesting studies are possible. By 
a concurrent reading of the great book of Nature, 
ever open and always before the country child, and 
of the biblical record of man's spiritual experience 
through many ages and in interplay with the same 
natural order the child is bound to get new and 
valid appreciations of his relationship to the 
Creator and to His co-workers in the art of life. 

As a rule, and even without much formal teach- 
ing, the country child will be found sensitive to the 
concept of God simply because he lives in the midst 
of the creative process and is consciously dependent 
upon a power outside himself. His life-premise 
cannot possibly be that of cosmic anarchy. The 
natural order says, ^^Obey and prosper," and the 
process is so simple, immediate, and sure that 
the voice of God is all but audible and his hand 
almost seen. Hence the observation of all li\dng 
things, the miracles of reproduction and growth, 
beauty and majesty, favor that fear of the Lord 
which is the beginning of wisdom. 

All of this calls for elucidation on the part of the 
teacher who will use the child's material and the 
parallel biblical Hterature for the purpose of laying 
deep the spiritual foundation of good citizenship, 



io8 The Church School of Citizenship 

namely, belief in, and accountability to, God. 
The city child in his more mechanistic situation 
cannot so easily find God. Recently an eighth- 
grade boy in a Chicago school said to the principal, 
'^ Where is the factory that makes the seeds?'' 

The country child finds himself as a worker and 
as a worker together mth God. But it is equally 
important that he become a colaborer with his 
fellows. According to the usual criticism, the 
farmer's civic weakness consists in his narrow indi- 
\dduaKsm. By virtue of his occupation he is 
socially very independent. The major reforms of 
rural life await his disposition to co-operate, and 
the numerous small towns and \dllages of prosper- 
ous farming districts find that the retired farmer 
is not usually pubhc-spirited and progressive. 
In fact, with the high price of land and the accom- 
pan}dng increase in tenantry, an idle, well-to-do, 
and unprogressive landlordism is rapidly develop- 
ing in the United States. It becomes prematurely 
non-productive, its social reaction is negative, and 
on the whole it is quite as culpable and more pro- 
\dncial in terms of public welfare than are the idle 
rich of the great cities. 

Rural education for citizenship must meet and 
overcome this prevalent tendency so deeply 
grounded in the occupation and mind of the farmer. 
Attempts to lift the horizon of the adult will be 
less successful than socializing the child from the 



Civics in the Rural Church School 109 

start. The nature of living together in units larger 
than the family will need to be emphasized. 
Ordinarily family loyalty and co-operation on the 
farm will excel that of the city, and the nature of 
that intimate interdependence in terms of produc- 
tion, consumption, and distribution will be very 
real within this initial biological group. But this, 
although a good foundation, is not sufficient for 
that sort of living together which a successful com- 
munity demands. A rigidity that defeats effec- 
tive social action may still persist in the family 
which is internally loyal and industrious. Field 
and Nearing^ give a humorous instance of this in 
the case of a rural community in New York state. 
The school board being divided on the issue of the 
color that the building should be painted and 
neither side being willing to yield, the result was 
a checkerboard pattern alternating in gray and 
white. 

The approach to this problem of bald self- 
interest pitted against community interest must 
be on the basis of the child's observation and must 
take its direction from the polestar of the Golden 
Rule. The pupil in the church school brings the 
data with him. For example, on the side of limit- 
ing personal license for community good there is 
the farmer's treatment of weeds. What weeds 
were noticed on the way to school ? Did you see 

^ Community Civics j p. 15. 



no The Church School of Citizenship 

Canada thistle or wild mustard in the fields or 
along the roadside ? What do they do to crops ? 
Will they remain on the farm or by the roadside 
where you saw them ? How does the thistle seed 
travel? Is it fair that the man who works hard 
to raise good crops and to keep his land clean should 
have his work spoiled and his land damaged by 
the neglect of a neighbor ? What should be done 
about it? Should he quarrel with his neighbor? 
Should he go to law for damages? Should we 
have a weed law and enforce it both for field and 
for roadside ? Show how this would be an applica- 
tion in civics of the Golden Rule. So of hog 
cholera, the hoof and mouth disease, tuberculosis, 
and very many diseases and pests which involve 
immense loss — the only way to be a good citizen 
and to protect the whole community is to love your 
neighbor as yourself. 

On the constructive side the sources in the 
pupil's experience are even richer. Suppose he 
describes threshing, silo filling, irrigation, the 
co-operative elevator, the farmers' telephone, or 
any of the large operations in which neighbors 
unite in effort and sometimes in the pooling of 
capital, then the effectiveness of group action will 
become clear and the nature of society's agreement 
in the making and upkeep of roads, postal service, 
and schools will be so conceived as to justify the 
necessary tax and to stimulate a wholesome, con- 



Civics in the Rueal Church School hi 

tinuous interest in the undertakings of the com- 
munity as a whole. 

All such experience when once clarified in the 
light of Christian ethics is bound to crystallize 
into community sentiment. The picnics, gala 
days, and celebrations will come to have corporate 
rather than clannish or sectarian significance. The 
hope of any intelligent and lasting co-operation 
among the religious agencies of the countryside 
depends upon drill in co-operative action touching 
the farmer's material gains and validated at first 
by larger financial returns. 

The whole matter of yield comes up for moral 
review and bears upon the citizen's productive 
value to the state. The boys will be posted on the 
ordinary yield per acre for the standard crops of the 
neighborhood. They should be encouraged to 
make comparisons between the best and the poorest 
with explanations if possible. The average for the 
township, county, and country at large should be 
known and comparison made with one's own farm. 
The immoral nature of any deliberate failure to 
make the best use of God's resources as intrusted 
to the farmer should be pointed out. Descriptions 
of seed testing and of intensive, scientific effort on 
experimental plots will not seem foreign either to 
good citizenship or to religion when thus inter- 
preted, and the corn club along with all the others 
into which country boys and girls are being 



112 The Church School of Citizenship 

gathered to produce and conserv^e food will not 
seem alien to the church school. 

Such a consideration of the Christian standards 
of farming will bear ver\' directly on good citizen- 
ship. The moral problems involved in the careless 
greed which ''mines'' the land, or depletes the 
soil by failure to obser\^e the right rotation of crops, 
or deforests great regions heedless of the rights of 
oncoming generations and of the people at large 
are specifically problems with which the state must 
deal. To be guilty of these practices is to be a bad 
citizen. To profess Christianity while following 
such practices is at best but self-delusion. The 
great advantage of the ci\'ic element in the rural 
church school lies in the concreteness and imme- 
diacy of the problems handled. Whatever may 
have been the changing phases of Christian educa- 
tion in past periods, it seems clear that the cr\dng 
need today is that of apphing our Lord's teaching 
(such as that in the Sermon on the Mount) to the 
actual affairs of men. 

So of animal husbandry, dair}Tng. and poultry 
raising. The pupil who tells how he takes care of 
his horse, cow, or poultr}' and comes to beheve 
that his teacher in the church school regards such 
work well done as within the plan and purpose of 
religious education will have discovered a way of 
expressing his obedience to God in terms which 
are for him perhaps more suitable than pubUc 



Civics in the Rural Church School 113 

prayer and testimony. The kind and faithful care 
of God's creatures may constitute no ecstatic flight 
into the Infinite Love, but it is part of that march 
of life in which God unconsciously comes to us. 

Very much should be made of the home, its 
manners, conversation, reading, housing, water 
supply, drainage, light, air, premises, outbuildings, 
barns, program, hospitality, family spirit, and 
mutual service. The attractiveness and con- 
venience of the house can so often be improved 
at little cost that what is most needed is not money 
but rather the suggestions and standards which 
the church school can persistently provide. The 
prosperity of barns with every convenience and 
kitchens contrived to necessitate the maximum 
drudgery is of doubtful worth. We are hearing 
much about the human element in industry. That 
is well and good, but the farmer's wife is a human 
element to whom relief comes in many cases all 
too late or not at all. 

Let the boys and girls as they become old enough 
to do so canvass thoroughly the home situation. 
Any ideals not applicable there are worth little for 
religious education. Unless the prosperity of the. 
farmer is Christianized into fulness of life it will 
not make much difference to his family what the 
yield may be per acre or the price per bushel. The 
automobile, which has cut one string of his purse, 
needs to be followed by a program of Christian 



114 The Church School or Citizenship 

culture, which, although under way in many a 
woman's club, needs the matchless gospel of self- 
giving for the good of others. If one may use the 
word culture to denote the spiritual values of life 
rather than any veneer or snobbishness and mean 
thereby the fine art of living at one's best, then it 
becomes the task of the church school to bring this 
culture to those whose prosperity as a class is 
bound to push them out into something either 
better or worse than their former state. 

The ideals of farm boys and girls of the present 
generation will conform to the cheap and glaring 
urban type which gauges the desirable, now for the 
first time within reach of farm people, in terms of 
joy rides, cabarets, and amateurish forays into 
^^high life," unless the quest of romance and social 
expression is satisfied in more ennobling ways. 
With the present facilities of motor car, inter- 
urban line, telephone, and labor-reducing machin- 
ery the grip of the town is tightening upon country 
life, and instead of the development of initiative 
and resourcefulness in meeting the social needs of 
the rural district there is a tendency to remain 
atomistic on the land and to flock to the town for 
the purchase of pleasure. The great civic virtue 
of homemade pleasure, with its accompaniment 
of neighborliness, is in danger of surrendering to 
the commercialized, non-social form. One of the 
underlying causes of the retirement of farmers to 



Civics in the Rural Church School 115 

the town, there to spend the latter third or half 
of life in idleness, is the failure of rural people to 
organize their social life so that school and church 
shall be adequate to meet the higher standards of 
living that prosperity and the increased leisure of 
the young people make possible. 

While recognizing that in some respects the 
use of the urban center is advantageous in terms 
of efficiency and as an offset to monotonous 
routine, it must also be borne in mind that a 
distinct loss will be incurred unless social life is 
maintained among the neighboring farm families 
in any given section. What is needed is a dis- 
criminating use of the city and also wholesome 
social life circulating through the homes and other 
institutions of the open country. Otherwise the 
people on the land may become as isolated and 
non-social as the flat dweller of the city. 

It is not as if we could or would shut off com- 
merce with the town in any of its legitimate social 
advantages. The aim should rather be so to 
regulate their use that initiative and social resource- 
fulness of constructive worth should remain with 
the yovmg people on the land. With an alert class 
in the church and the telephone in every home it 
might be possible to organize the pleasure trips to 
town in such a way as to guarantee that moral pro- 
tection which the group affords and to make the 
wisest and most profitable selection of the ^^ movie" 



ii6 The Church School or Citizenship 

plays and other entertainments which the city 
oJBfers. The feeling that there is no possibility of 
a ^^good time" at home and the loss of all power to 
use the neighborhood homes, school, hall, or church 
for such ends are the dangers to be avoided. 

For this reason it is desirable to study the home 
not only as a family institution but as a social 
center. The entertainments of neighborhood clubs 
and of musical or literary societies have a certain 
public value, and auxiliaries of this kind fostered 
by the church school will probably render their 
largest social service in circulating from home to 
home. So also the social efficiency of the homes 
in entertaining the young people in their parties 
and dances may offset the lure of the pernicious 
Saturday-night public dance in the town some miles 
away. The delusion that city boys and girls are 
rather soiled and country boys and girls quite 
pure is indulged by those who do not know that the 
community's social inefficiency produces about the 
same results in either situation. 

The formulation and execution of a program of 
better social diversion for the country will depend 
upon individual initiative and leadership. In 
most cities social organization has reached a stage 
where regular provision is made for play and 
recreation and the population is sufficient to make 
steady use of the facilities provided at public 
expense. But if the country is to have '^a good 



Civics in the Rural Church School 117 

time" some enterprising person must go ahead and 
bring it to pass with such voluntary aid as may be 
offered. 

Unless such effort is made, all the red-letter days 
of the year will slip by unimproved and in dreary 
monotony. If New Year's Day, Washington's or 
Lincoln's Birthday, St. Patrick's Day, St. Val- 
entine's Day, Arbor Day, May Day, Memorial 
Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween, 
Thanksgiving, or Christmas is to contribute to 
social and civic upbuilding, then someone must 
assume leadership and plan and work well in ad- 
vance of the occasion. The church should defi- 
nitely plan to capture these opportunities for the 
community's good; and if, as is now quite common, 
there are young men and young women of high- 
school and college training in the church they 
should be set to this kind of civic service. 

There is also an opening for effective social 
work in connection with the county fair. The 
tendency toward commercialization and a riot of 
side shows which defeat the social and agricultural 
aims of the fair is very pronounced, and the church 
group is challenged with the task of protecting and 
developing the legitimate social, educational, and 
recreative features of this distinctive enterprise of 
country people. In addition to the exhibits of 
farm produce, stock, cooking, and needlework the 
school should be given a larger place. Not only 



ii8 The Church School of Citizenship 

samples of the children's work, but the children 
themselves at work and engaged in song and super- 
vised play should be present. The recreation 
program should be more of the people's own mak- 
ing, with sports, contests, community singing, 
dancing, and the use of all local talent. In this 
way they come to know themselves and their 
neighbors and to enjoy co-operation. A certain 
moral obligation rests upon the church group to 
inaugurate these better methods and by the 
impartial selection of competent helpers and thor- 
oughly unselfish motives to demonstrate its good- 
will in loyal service of the community. Such 
undertakings are a curriculum of citizenship. 

As part of the play revival in America another 
very happy form of civic entertainment has found 
favor in recent years. It is the community pa- 
geant, in which the history of the settlement is 
dramatized on a large scale. For every farming 
district there is a hamlet, village, or town that 
serves as the trading center. It is the social 
nucleus of the district and is composed of those 
whose interests and experiences are substantially 
at one with the people who work the land. Every 
such settlement has a history, some of which is a 
matter of record and much of which is to be found 
only in the memory of the older inhabitants. As 
a rule it is not well known, and many items of 
beauty, legitimate pride, hardihood, and patriot- 



Civics in the Rural Church School 119 

ism are lost to view and remain ineffective for 
citizenship. 

Sometimes the old settlers' club keeps some of 
its traditions alive for its lineal descendants, but 
it is very desirable that the whole population be 
gathered into the charm and stimulation of its 
own local history. Anyone who has noticed the 
interest that in such communities attaches to the 
reminiscences and gossip of the old raconteur will 
understand the psychology which supports the 
community pageant.^ Its civic value consists in 
the ideal dramatization of the past running back 
to the Indian occupants of the territory, the Lewis 
and Clark expedition, or the prairie schooners 
with pioneers from Vermont or ''York State/' 
but even more in the enUstment of persons of all 

^ The historical pageant is but one of the many possibilities. 
There are the "Pageant of the Trees" from William Morris' poem 
of that name, "The Moon's Silver Cloak" and "The Honest 
Woodman" from Aesop {Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, 
Book I, Houghton Mifflin Co.), "The Grasshopper and the Ants" 
{The Dramatic Festival, A. Craig), "Bearskin," "The Magic 
Wood," "King Alfred and the Cakes" {Little Plays for Little 
People, Hodder & Stoughton), "The Pageant of the Months" 
from the poem by C. Rosetti, "Pandora," by Longfellow, "Fairy 
Scenes," from Alfred Noyes's Sherwood. Harper's Book of 
Little Plays and Historical Plays for Children by Bird and Sterling 
will be found very useful in work with the junior population. 

The success of the Little Country Theater organized a few 
years ago by the North Dakota Agricultural College at Fargo 
shows something of the country possibilities awaiting develop- 
ment. This movement offers such plays as can be put on in the 



I20 The Church School of Citizenship 

ages and abilities in a voluntary effort that exhibits 
and develops community intelligence and pride. 
Everyone can help, and all who help and all who 
come are made better citizens. It is not supposed 
that the church group as such will do this, but here 
again is the opportunity for initiative and leader- 
ship, and there is the added touch of church pride 
in the fact that every such history will find among 
the commanding figures that shaped the new 
settlement the circuit rider or the parish minister 
in the first line. 

So of the picnics, plowing contests, and other 
forms of community round-up; all that is needed 
to give them high civic value is that forethought 
and leadership which the church can give and 
which when lacking leaves the way open for 



farm home, schoolhouse, or hall. The most elaborate city use 
of the pageant is furnished by that of St. Louis under the direction 
of Percy MacKaye and Thomas Wood Stevens. 

The following references will be of value to the director of 
rural and village plays: Play and Recreation for the Open Country, 
H. S. Curtis; The Playground: the entire number of this magazine 
for November, 1912; ''The Meriden Pageant" June, 1913; "A 
Rural Pageant," September, 1913; "Village Recreation in Leb- 
anon, Ohio," December, 1913; "The Play Director in the Small 
Community," and "Work for Girls in a Rural Community*' 
August, 1914; "Rural Play," December, 1914; "Roosevelt on 
Rural Recreation," "The Rural World at Play," and "StafiFord- 
ville Junior Fair and Field Day," February, 1915; "Rural Com- 
munities at Play," April, 1915. The Playground is pubHshed at 
I Madison Avenue, New York. There is also valuable material 
in every number of Rural Manhood, published by the Associated 
Press of the Y.M.C.A. 



Civics in the Rural Church School 121 

deterioration in place of civic gain. Such events, 
inviting, as they do, Hberal contact with the people 
and control of the social spirit, cannot be ignored 
if the rural church is actually to engage in training 
for citizenship. 

For the purpose of revealing the social assets of 
their vicinity the pupils should make maps locating 
the farms within a radius of, say, six miles and 
such public buildings as schoolhouses, meeting- 
houses, and town halls. A list of the organiza- 
tions represented in the district should also be 
made. The aim should be to ascertain what 
social opportunity is open to young people and 
how these opportunities may be used and im- 
proved. 

Under good leadership the older young people 
and some of the more progressive adults may 
undertake a rural survey. We sometimes think 
that it is only the poor of the great cities who are 
submerged and neglected, but it is pathetically 
true that in prosperous farming districts where 
short-term renters come and go without hope of 
owning any of the expensive land there is a great 
deal of social neglect. The church school that 
wishes to gather all classes into its fold for the 
enrichment of life and the building of Christian 
citizenship needs to know who these diffident 
people are and to carry its friendship liberally to 
their doors. 



122 The Church School of Citizenship 

The renting class, which is on the increase and 
for which the opportunity of cheap land grows 
steadily less, which has no stake in the community 
and is sensitive with respect to the landlord class 
above it, is in a fair way to make little of social 
life and less of good citizenship. As an expression 
of Christian spirit and true neighborliness and as 
part of its educational task the rural church must 
reach the renter and his family. They must be 
won into such social fellowship as will make life less 
barren. 

In many of the rural districts a large part of the 
civic task will be that of assimilating the foreign- 
born and their children. Those religious bodies 
whose ministry is trained abroad and whose 
ostensible duty has been the perpetuation of 
foreign customs and language will either be con- 
verted to loyalty to the United States and unques- 
tioned support of the country that has given them 
opportunity and freedom, or they will lose their 
children and young people to the religious organiza- 
tions that stand foursquare for Americanism. 
There are localities in which the church school 
might best further citizenship by teaching the 
English language and explaining the fundamental 
nature of our democratic government. At the 
present time, when so great a strain is placed upon 
those whose blood ties bind them to a people 
governed by the arch enemies of democracy, it is 



Civics in the Rural Church School 123 

quite possible that the church school to which 
their children come may by kindness and good-will 
prevent the natural love of kin from hardening 
into the bitter spirit of treason against this country. 
This, however, is part of the emergency work of the 
present crisis. If ^^citizenship" had been given 
its rightful place in secular and religious education 
during the past fifty years much of personal heart- 
ache and hatred and public peril would have been 
avoided. 

One task of the church school which is espe- 
cially important for the older young people and 
adults is to open the available avenues of informa- 
tion which are commonly unused. It may be very 
easy to secure the best books from nearby public 
libraries, but this will not be done unless the matter 
is pressed or the church becomes a library branch 
for this very purpose. Publications of the state 
schools of agriculture and government bulletins, 
state and federal, are invaluable, but will not be 
secured without similar endeavor and prepara- 
tion. Lecturers and demonstrators with impor- 
tant and interesting information for the material 
and social welfare of farm people are available at 
trifling cost, but someone must take the initiative 
in securing their services. The older young people, 
the men's club, or the woman's society of the church 
may well perform civic service in inaugurating 
this educational work. 



124 The Church School of Citizenship 

Any fair consideration of the government's con- 
cern for rural welfare, from the Roosevelt Com- 
mission on Country Life to the recent farm-loan 
legislation, will certainly stimulate the patriotism 
of farm people; and it is quite necessary for their 
own and the country's good that they be posted 
in all phases of this movement. Let the church 
people promote patriotism on this solid ground of 
service rendered rather than on the inconclusive 
sentimental appeal. 

There is a certain danger in the civic approach 
that has been thus far suggested in this chapter. 
It is the danger of arrest. Suppose that the 
lessons based so obviously on self-interest and 
immediately applicable to farm life serve only to 
confirm rural people in personal gain and strictly 
local improvement; that in the case of the exten- 
sion of interest beyond the immediate family social 
imagination halts at the township or county line; 
that the citizen be made more fat and comfortable 
in his provincialism. This is the fear that properly 
possesses the souls of those who have struggled 
with the heavy materialism of a country parish, and 
it is the underlying basis of all opposition to placing 
these ^^ secular " subjects in a curriculum of religious 
education. Why should the church teach agri- 
culture ? Dives needs something else. The loaves 
and fishes are always a grave problem for the 
reHgious leader. 



Civics in the Rural Church School 125 

Citizenship ideals with a radius no greater than 
farm or township will prove disappointing, while 
religious ideals that never touch ground within 
that area will prove useless. The latter will not 
work, the former may be projected. Standing on 
the sure ground of immediate interest the church 
school of citizenship may lift the rural vision to a 
wider outlook. Rural life needs irrigation from 
the great waters of world-affairs. Only a tough 
and stunted citizenship is possible without this. 
Here it is that the imperial nature of the gospel 
must be brought to bear. After all, it is a kind of 
life that makes possible a world-brotherhood that 
we are striving for, and when by the improvement 
of reading and the encouragement of travel and all 
forms of culture we have done our best, still if we 
lack Christ's love of fellow-man our citizenship is 
incomplete. Just as reciprocity between country 
and city is essential to both, so the play of the 
whole world upon the remote rural home is neces- 
sary to its largest life; and how often has it hap- 
pened that the greatest human issues have claimed 
their coming protagonists at these humble hearths ! 
The really big problems need no condiments to 
whet the appetite of youth, and when once they 
strike the soul homespun and cowhide cannot keep 
one provincial. 

It is therefore highly desirable that the minister 
bring to the country people his best thought and 



126 The Church School or Citizenship 

the latest and most accurate information on 
national and world problems. These concern city 
and coimtry equally. They constitute a moral 
burden making for unity. It is by espousal of the 
cause of justice and brotherhood for all men that 
we become, in some positive sense, reUgious. 

Liberal use should be made also of the poetry 
and other Hterature of country life. Such books 
as L. H. Bailey's Outlook to Xature and his poems 
on Wind and Weather will quicken spiritual appre- 
ciation. The goal of all these efforts is not merely 
the efficient farmer but men and women who live 
richly in the mastery of nature, in the fellowship 
of family Hfe and neighborly relations, in glad 
ministry to the common good, and as worthy 
citizens in each of the widening circles of human 
association. The Christian principle must domi- 
nate each area and vnll not rest short of that 
republic of the spirit wherein we are citizens of the 
world and therefore truly children of God. 

With these suggestions bearing upon some of the 
distinctively rural elements in civic training the 
church school should incorporate the bulk of what 
has been offered in the preceding chapters. The 
fact that the process of U\dng together in organic 
relation is so patent in rural life should lead us to 
expect superior results in the attempt to teach 
citizenship. The child and the city are eternally 
incompatible. There the process of U\dng to- 



Civics in the Rural Church School 127 

gether is so complex, so subordinated to com- 
mercial ends, so artificial and arbitrary that the 
task of orienting the child in a social order which 
will appeal to his reason and have basis in daily 
experience is exceedingly difficult. On the other 
hand, childhood in the country is of itself the very 
beginning of good citizenship. 

QUESTIONS, investigations, EXPERIMENTS 

1. What advantages does country life ojffer for the 
teaching of good citizenship ? 

2. With what organizations should the rural church 
school co-operate ? 

3. What is the civic value of the community pageant ? 

4. Illustrate the use of the child's observation in teaching 
rural civics. 

5. Plan a class session in which you use the weed com- 
missioner. 

6. Plan a class session in which you use the road master. 

7. Plan three class sessions in which you use the county 
agricultural expert. 

8. Outline a policy for the social development of country 
homes. 

9. Outline a policy for the stimulation and improvement 
of country reading. 

10. Make a series of five lessons based on distinctly rural 
material from the Bible and suitable for children about ten 
years of age. 

11. Plan a field day for a country district. 

12. Make a list of the young people in your church who 
have had high-school or college training and indicate what 
church and community service each person might be 
expected to render. 



128 The Church School of Citizenship 

13. What village improvements are desirable in your 
locality and how could your church start and organize a 
movement for the realization of some one of these ? 

14. Is there a woman's club in your community ? . What 
is its program for the current year ? 

15. Do you have a county Y.M.C.A. ? What is it 
doing ? How does your church co-operate ? 

16. What books on rural life are in your church-school 
library? In the nearest town library? In the public- 
school library ? 

17. What use are you making of the various libraries 
and of the circulating libraries available ? 

18. What religious agencies are at work in your town- 
ship ? In what ways do they co-operate ? 

19. Plan and carry out a township survey. (See Felton, 
The Study of a Rural Parish, published by Missionary 
Education Movement, New York.) 

20. Have your pupils of about fifteen years of age write 
brief papers covering their observations on the advantages 
of scientific farming. 

21. Have your pupils of about ten years of age write 
a letter aimed to persuade some city friend of the advantages 
of country life. 

22. Outline plans for reading and discussion on the 
part of a community brotherhood meeting in your 
church. 

23. What is the annual per capita cost for reUgious 
education in your church school ? What improvements do 
you need ? How might these be financed ? 

24. What is your school doing to assist the nation in the 
present war ? 

25. Make a plan for presenting to your young people the 
nature and claims of five vocations that render distinct 
public service. 



Civics in the Rural Church School 129 

READING RECOMMENDED 

Chubb, P. Festivals and Plays. 

Field, J. College Women and Country Leadership, 

Field and Nearing. Community Civics, 

Hill, M. The Teaching of Civics, 

McKeever, W. A. Farm Boys and Girls. 

Vogt, P. L. Rural Sociology. 

Wilson, W. H. The Evolution of the Country Community, 

. The Church at the Center. 

. The Church of the Open Country, 



CHAPTER VI 

ADULTS IN THE CHURCH SCHOOL OF 
CITIZENSHIP 

This chapter aims to present, somewhat criti- 
cally, the status of the church in the democratic 
community, to indicate her civic obligations, and to 
suggest practical methods of co-operation between 
church and state. The problems treated have for 
some time confronted thoughtful ministers and 
laymen. Yet the rank and file of church members 
have not been educated to the community point 
of view. A program in which the church herself 
has been the chief concern has left the great mass 
of members with nothing to do. The objectives 
of the church have not been big enough to make 
the whole body a working force. Because the 
task has not been sufficiently large and difficult the 
appeal has fallen below the heroic possibilities of 
mankind. Vigorous souls are disappointed when 
they discover themselves to be, not in a campaign 
with hazards, but in comfortable quarters now 
and forever; while the sluggish and selfish are 
religiously confirmed in an individual ^^safety- 
first" manner of life which is theirs by faith. 

This has been the tendency in so far as the 
church has been a separate group, an end in itself, 

130 



Adults in the Church School 131 

an asylum from the world, or a safe transport to 
the hereafter. But no church is wholly thus. 
Beginning with propaganda for converts to even 
the narrowest faith, some social interest is bound 
to follow, and the extension of such effort in 
missions of all kinds always forces some recognition 
of a social solidarity in which many agencies, for 
better or for worse, are at work. 

Perhaps the most urgent need confronting the 
church is that of setting herself right in the public 
mind. There is, in all, a vast amount of criticism 
to the effect that the church is lukewarm on civic 
matters, undemocratic in sympathy and methods, 
divisive where community action is needed, mediae- 
val in thought, class-conscious in personnel, dumb 
and inactive when confronted with the issues of 
social justice. Her direct influence upon, or 
control of, community life has steadily diminished 
from Colonial days to the present time. Her 
interest in government is negative or critical, and 
her obligation to supply the state with servants of 
superior ability and high moral purpose is not 
realized and met. 

Quite apart from the important matter of the 
form of government under which a people may be 
organized, it will be generally conceded that the 
morality of those holding public office vitally affects 
common welfare. Moral failure in public trust not 
only blights the popular mind with the frost of 



132 The Church School or Citizenship 

cynicism, but allows predatory interests to rob the 
whole people, who. for the time being, have no 
advocate or defender other than the pubHcly 
elected official. If, therefore, democracy is ever 
to discover and retain efficient ser\'ants after the 
fashion of private concerns, she wUl need the best 
judgment and the full moral support of church 
people. Of even greater importance is the neces- 
sity of maintaining high moral standards in the 
citizenship generally, so that almost any popular 
choice may be pohtically safe, and that malfeasance 
may be promptly and \dgorously punished. To 
this end the free debate of public questions in the 
light of the highest ethics becomes imperative. 

Such being the case, it is in point to ask whether 
the church suppHes such leadership to the state, 
whether she leavens the mass with such working 
ideals of integrity and ser\dce as will automatically 
right governmental wrongs and guarantee pro- 
gressive righteousness, and whether she fosters 
the enlightened debate of pubhc questions. The 
minority standing of the whole church group, 
however weakened by sectarianism, does not in 
itself absolve the church from rendering great 
service to the state. For the group suppljing 
leadership always exerts an influence far above the 
ratio of its numerical strength. Hence the question 
remains whether the church fosters such a con- 
ception of civic duty as will impel her adherents 



Adults in the Church School 133 

both to serve in public capacity and to do their 
duty at the polls. Leaders in anti-saloon propa- 
ganda report 40 to 60 per cent of the church vote 
registered in the cities studied, so that the actual 
church vote probably falls below half of her voting 
strength. 

The church means to be unselfish and really 
so thinks of itself. Contributors to its equipment, 
its ministry, its services, feel themselves to be giving 
for a public good. They mean that religious oppor- 
tunity shall be thus open to the community. Yet 
in practice the matter does not work out quite so 
simply. To the outsider the church seems to be 
existing simply in and for itself, and the religious 
advantages which it offers seem to be rather con- 
descending in their character. It may be that the 
popular, unchurched mind is too suspicious and has 
learned in the school of hard knocks to look for the 
revenue feature behind all movements as well as 
to resent superimposed benefits; but certainly the 
present organization and standard activities of the 
church do not impress the mass with any heroic 
proof of her unselfishness. More recent forms of 
propaganda for the Kingdom of God through the 
secular and organic life of the state are eliciting a 
vast amount of unpaid service for the public good; 
and until very recently the church has hardly 
recognized these heroic struggles lor righteousness 
outside her walls. 



134 The Church School of Citizenship 

Contributors to most of these reform organiza- 
tions ask no return in comfortable pews, fine 
music, and aesthetic solace, but only that the cause 
of human justice be promoted. The socialist 
believes that his cause is greater than that of the 
church, the trade-unionist that his is more urgent, 
and both are prepared to make sacrifices which 
compare favorably with any similar exhibit in the 
modern church. Similarly, most of the societies 
working for reform and amelioration, even though 
they be often supplied with impulse and ideal 
through church religion, regard their propaganda 
as more urgent than ecclesiastical effort. The 
suspicion that sectarian leaders and local ministers 
are animated by something other than a passion 
for human welfare creeps into the public mind, and 
the man of the street discounts the paid enthusiast 
who often betrays the fact that he is working pri- 
marily for his church and not disinterestedly for the 
common good. The church by virtue of her long 
history and substantial success in attracting the 
well-to-do has become professionalized, while the 
younger movements of the struggling classes pos- 
sess more of the initial spirit of Christianity when 
apostles and prophets did not work for hire; and 
membership in these new organizations is usually 
more conscious and vital than it is in the older body. 

Again, the internal organization of the local 
church, even when ostensibly democratic, ever 



Adults in the Church School 135 

tends toward bureaucratic control. So far as the 
preacher is concerned, this is due to the assumption 
that he speaks ex cathedra and has some sort of 
authority other than that of demonstrated truth 
as so perceived by his hearers. But the common 
man who is working out his economic and social 
salvation in other bodies and who has qualified as a 
democrat abhors a muzzled meeting. For him 
the sanctity of the truth in the case stands above 
consecrated buildings, personages, and dictators. 
Furthermore, in many churches so little effort is 
made to refer matters of policy, program, election, 
and expenditure to the whole body for decision 
that the people become supine in their goodness and 
almost grateful to those who, with presumably the 
best of intentions, nullify self-government. 

As any given church becomes large and pros- 
perous there develops a tendency to remove its 
government from the rank and file. The usurpa- 
tion of the '^ring" is not by design, but springs 
mainly from the bother of maintaining an active 
and therefore real democracy. In the election of 
officials and the adoption of policies and budgets 
there is often a cut-and-dried method which hardly 
preserves the form of democracy, much less its 
substance. Instances are known w^here members 
in good standing have been refused information 
as to the church's expenditures on its standard 
activities; which, of course, implies that the 



136 The Church School of Citizenship 

contributor — and therefore, by implication, any 
or all of the members — might be kept ignorant of 
what the rulers do. In so far as such practices 
obtain the spirit of democracy is violated, for self- 
government permits no secrecy in the handling of 
the common funds. The church must meet the 
standards of a public which is debating, and in 
some instances trying, the initiative, referendum, 
and recall. 

With some notable exceptions the music of the 
church takes the same upper-class, patronizing 
trend. Money which might have been spent to 
educate the whole body in glorious and unifying 
praise and in the training of large numbers of 
children and youth to participate worthily in 
public worship is often spent on a few imported 
singers, who give a high-class and critical stamp 
to the service, but seldom draw out the congrega- 
tion in the joyful abandon of democratic praise. 
Again the psychology is that of a superimposed, 
although problematical, benefit, as contrasted with 
a social achievement of the whole body. 

It is perhaps iconoclastic to suggest that the 
church needs to re-examine her meetinghouse in 
the light of this crude and relentless spirit of 
democracy. Is it best to occupy a distinctive 
building or to use quarters in which other popular 
assemblies of the people gather and express them- 
selves? Should the place in which reHgion is 



Adults in the Church School 137 

advocated possess a solemn grandeur, an awesome 
and aesthetic worth, a crystahized tradition of the 
might and sanctity of the historic church ? Should 
it bow the soul in mute acceptance of a ministry 
which it and its officials mediate, and send men 
forth pardoned, purified, and serene to meet the 
unceasing struggle of the outer world ? Perhaps 
so; but if this be all, democracy remains unsatisfied. 

It is noteworthy that the forward movements of 
the church, in which it has found the people, have 
been marked by unconventionality and extramural 
effort. The open fields, market places, street 
corners, town halls, schoolhouses, and rough 
* tabernacles'' have characterized the populariza- 
tion of religion from the time of Jesus to the present 
day. The address of man to man in forum fashion 
as is the practice in politics is standard democratic 
form. Aesthetic and sedative values reside in the 
ecclesiastical treatment, but the implications of 
the separateness of religion from common places 
and from common life, and its failure thus to come 
to grips with the people, as well as its shyness of 
intellectual struggle in the open without fear or 
favor, have made the religion of the sanctuary the 
religion of the few. 

Some maintain that America's large European 
immigration demands the reproduction here of the 
great symbols and bulwarks of religion as set forth 
in the imposing cathedrals of the Old World. 



138 The Church School or Citizenship 

But those who so argue do not reckon with democ- 
racy, lack faith in the ability of America to work 
out a form consonant with her spirit, and forget 
that the immigrant himself, seeking liberty and 
larger life, is very tired of the old patriarchal 
system — which he regards as largely an imposition 
— and is passing through skepticism toward a 
religion that is popularly and intellectually based. 
The church which seeks to serve him through the 
old architecture of monarchical religion will prob- 
ably have a harder task than the group which 
seeks to meet him on the democratic level, where he 
may be paid the compliment of working out his own 
salvation with as much honesty and independence 
as he exercises in his other groups, social and 
national. 

In some quarters the church is criticized for 
condoning or fostering social stratification. It is 
thought that the social disabilities imposed upon 
the negro are increased by the church's policy of 
segregation, and that the assimilation of immigrants 
is impeded by conserving their language and 
customs in separate church organizations. Un- 
doubtedly the church should so specialize her 
method as to be able to minister to newcomers in 
their native tongues. But to erect and maintain 
separate buildings for these people retards assimila- 
tion and stratifies the democracy. In this way the 
church is often working at cross-purposes with the 



Adults in the Church School 139 

public school, and long after the children have 
been prepared to become part and parcel of the 
common American life the church will be found 
accentuating by its separate buildings, organiza- 
tions, and language those clannish factors which 
impede a hearty and reliable democracy. 

For obvious and perhaps valid reasons little 
has been written on sectarianism as an impediment 
to social action. Yet, with due respect to those 
who are trying to do good according to their light 
and abihty, it must be acknowledged that in many 
places denominationalism impedes or arrests com- 
mimity effort for social ends. The adherent of the 
struggling church tends to shorten his radius of 
interest to that of the invalid institution, to consider 
its support the full measure of his benefaction, and 
to suspect the motives of rival churches if they 
essay anything more than a similar concern for 
their own slender tenure of life. The higher 
interests of the community, which might be served 
by combined action for educational, recreational, 
and civic improvement, are usually neglected 
because of the heavy tax for the maintenance of 
superfluous churches and because these serve to 
keep people of good-will apart. 

When these divisions are further accentuated by 
strict adherence to racial lines, so that impervious 
groups are maintained behind the barriers of for- 
eign thought-forms and language and the church 



I40 The Church School of Citizenship 

group identifies its religion with non-participation 
in the manners and aims of the community, then 
the church becomes a serious obstruction to the 
aims of the state and is morally chargeable with a 
misuse of the privileges which the state grants. 
The unfortunate tendency to live on the community 
rather than for and with it is fostered, along with 
the disability to co-operate intelligently in the 
common task of government. 

The gradual ahgnment of the church and the 
well-to-do is attested by their present partnership. 
Conversely there must have been some lack of 
congeniality to account for the absence of the 
struggling classes. For certainly both their social 
hunger and their need of help were greater than 
would be found with the ^^respectables/' while 
at the same time they were less competent to 
command other outlets. Had the church been 
democratic and socially concerned, rather than 
ecclesiastic and self-centered, there is no reason to 
doubt that she would have succeeded more largely 
with the mass than with the class, or at least 
equally with both. 

Another difficult element enters into the problem 
by virtue of the fact that the symbols and content 
of pubKc worship are largel}^ the product of an 
undemocratic age. Only in small degree as yet 
have the hopes of the masses risen into sacred song, 
great statements of faith, and adequate common 



Adults in the Church School 141 

prayer. The historic agencies used by the church 
are rich in ministries to the individual soul as 
contrasted with the same service for the col- 
lective life. Even in their best form they are 
the voice of the unworthy suppliant in the pres- 
ence of an absolute monarch. Without wholly 
denying the validity of this aspect of religion, one 
feels that for the democracy which has become 
conscious there remains an unsatisfied demand, an 
Immanuel passion as contrasted with the absentee 
potentate. 

So also the theological conceptions of the church 
are not cast in terms which are known to the com- 
mon man. The preacher may speak of sin as a 
great, undifferentiated state, with explanations as 
to how man came under sin and how the hearer may 
himself be extricated from this state, but the 
public mind does not think in these terms. The 
intelligent democrat has analyzed sin more specifi- 
cally than the appointed moral leader. To him 
definite sins have become clearly outlined. He 
believes that their prevention is more important 
than their forgiveness, and that prevention is, in 
a very large measure, possible. The point of view 
of the churchman is theological, that of the demo- 
crat is social. The one thinks of a state of sin, the 
other of a condition of society that defeats the real 
ends of life. The one seeks to change the spiritual 
status on a basis of belief, the other to change living 



142 The Church School of Citizenship 

conditions by direct action. Both may be right, 
but they do not understand each other. 

The church says children are unregenerate 
and need to be born anew, the democrat says 
many of them are victims of vicious Kving con- 
ditions imposed by greed and the industrial exploi- 
tation of human rights. The church would save 
them by the mystery of baptism or of faith, the 
democrat thinks that they would save themselves 
in a fair society where the hopes and possibilities 
of the soul might reach out through normal human 
experience to some sure sense of an Infinite 
Love. 

Similar contrasts exist all along the conscious 
boundary between church and mass. Church 
membership is for those who believe thus and so, 
and who submit to a certain ritual. These are the 
measures of excellence. But in the democracy 
social conduct that is fair and therefore beneficial 
to all is the sole consideration for rating and good 
citizenship. The ecclesiastic will admit the unself- 
ish person only on certain provisos of creed and 
ritual, and whoever qualifies in these respects is 
usually immune from censorship or dismissal, 
although his social conduct may be subversive of 
the public good, extortionate, and unjust. But 
the standard of the outside world has to do only 
with conduct, reckoning this or that profession as 
neither here nor there. 



Adults in the Church School 143 

All of this wide difference has come about in a 
fairly traceable way. The church has undergone 
a progressive loss of public function, as for example 
the control of education and relief, and there has 
crept in a subtle error, to the effect that her 
responsibility ceased with the passing over of these 
concerns to the state. She lacked the vision to see 
society whole, to work for the community in its 
totality, to shepherd all the people. Denomina- 
tionalism favored irresponsibility. Philanthropy 
supplanted public spirit, ambulance service got 
more attention than generalship. Arrest was 
inevitable, and, by the law of compensation, she 
turned with greater diligence to her traditions 
while the democracy marched on to meet its trying 
problems. 

As an offset to this tendency, which may become 
Pharisaic, democracy rightly expects the church 
to make plain to all men her redemptive principle, 
her formula for a perfect society. From democ- 
racy's viewpoint the church is not very efhcient in 
the discharge of this duty. Her failure to make 
her ideal ethic that of industries and nations may 
be due to many causes. It is not enough to fall 
back upon the weakness, inertia, and selfishness of 
human nature. For mankind, and especially the 
youth of the world, gives sufficient proof of an 
illimitable abiHty to respond to that which is 
difficult, hazardous, and sacrificial. Perhaps it is 



144 The Church School or Citizenship 

not too much to believe that in every normal life 
there comes a period in which selfhood demands 
that very thing as the crown of existence, the 
superb assurance of causal relation to one's world. 
Even within the church only trivial use is made of 
this pregnant idealism. The relay of new life so 
potential for world-betterment, coming over the 
crest that lies between childhood and manhood, 
dribbles down to commonplace self-interest because 
the trumpet call is not heard and leadership in the 
fight for human rights is lacking. The central 
meaning of the gospel is not made plain to, nor 
adopted by, any large number of the youth of the 
church. 

As for most of the mature and aged, the gospel 
has no social meaning commensurate with, or 
related to, democracy's problems. It is as if 
Jesus spoke in another room and his articulate 
imperatives reached the hearers only as a comfort- 
ing lullaby, an assurance that he was near, but 
not near enough to disturb. How else can one 
explain the timid seclusion of church people within 
half-empty buildings, the sterility of their summer 
religion, their failure to find the crowd, wherever 
it may be, and to compel attention, even if the 
attention secured were only hostile ? So far as 
the ^^ outsider" is concerned, he usually does not 
perceive what the church religionist is talking 
about. His supposition is that someone is trying 



Adults in the Church School 145 

to make converts to the church, intends to take 
up a collection, is earning easy money, is under- 
pinning a top-heavy industrialism by '^sawdust- 
trail'^ methods, or is ranting in an unknown tongue, 
which tongue is traditional theology. The obliga- 
gation of the church to get the gospel to the people 
as dynamic for achieving fulness of life, to make 
plain its consuming righteousness for the individual 
group, or nation, irrespective of class and privilege, 
and to infold all men in brotherly relationship 
is an obligation awaiting fulfilment. American 
democracy is offering a fair field for this enterprise, 
with her own future, if not her life, at stake. If 
the church is not to fail in this critical issue she 
will need to give at least as much attention to the 
understanding of society as she gives to her sacred 
books and her inherited doctrines. 

Mastery of biblical interpretation and church 
history is less difficult than an understanding of 
modern society. It is easier to study the residue 
of a past age than to measure the contending forces 
in current life and to learn their moral significance. 
Without this latter ability it happens that the 
authority of the remote past, with its uninterpreted 
ethics of the dead, is often used to halt righteous 
reform. People in general do not know the sig- 
nificance of historic religion for modern life, and 
this is due to the fact that the church has confined 
herself too exclusively to the study of tradition 



146 The Church School of Citizenship 

and has not performed a complete interpretation. 
Democracy has a moral right to expect that inter- 
pretation shall carry through to the active interest- 
centers of her own life. Anything less is pedantry 
and gets society nowhere. 

It may be that a dim sense of the church's failure 
to meet society's collective need of moral leadership 
underlies the present demand that she confine 
herself to the ^^ gospel/' implying thereby that the 
gospel is concerned solely with man's relation to 
God. And since the attempt to regulate social 
conduct is so fraught with the danger of offending 
church people, it is thought that a restriction of 
the church's function as an agent of religion is 
desirable. But the internal advantage of such a 
course is bound to be attended with further loss 
of influence in the democracy. The ethics of 
society in general would then prove to be more 
aggressive, vital, and urgent than that of the 
church group. 

Recent developments of the democratic spirit 
will test church organization in new ways. The 
progressive realization of woman's suffrage, growing 
logically out of general education and the feminist 
movement, is rapidly centering the attention and 
effort of women about civic affairs. A competitive 
bid is being made for the time and energy which 
women have so generously given to the church. 
During the past decade women have educated 



Adults in the Church School 147 

themselves, principally in their clubs, to understand 
and attack governmental evils which threaten 
their own and the public's interests, especially in 
the humanitarian field; and perhaps the bulk of 
humanitarian legislation has been proposed and 
urged by them. 

This means that the most intelligent women and 
those with capacity for leadership are turning 
from reHef to reform measures, from philanthropy 
to civics; and unless the church provides scope 
and expression for this redirected energy she will 
suffer the loss of that active support which the 
women have so readily given. A further implica- 
tion of this trend is the necessity of giving women 
a larger representation on the ofl&cial boards of the 
church. Democracy demands that representation 
be substantially balanced or, at least, placed upon 
a basis of merit and efi&ciency quite apart from 
any consideration of sex. 

From the foregoing criticisms no conclusion 
should be drawn as to the imminent decease of the 
church. For, while no one can reliably forecast 
how the newer altruism of justice will clothe or 
incorporate itself, only a poor historian would 
predict that the church will pass away because of 
its present maladjustment to democracy. The 
vitaHty of social institutions of long standing is 
almost unlimited, and in the case of the church 
there is the added conviction of being divinely 



148 The Church School of Citizenship 

ordained. Because of these two facts she can 
continue far beyond the day of her social utility 
and can, no doubt, last long enough to make or 
suffer the necessary adjustments. 

If, however, conformity to the democratic 
demand proves to be very slow, the experience will 
be no different from that of the schools which have 
had more reason to respond because supported by 
the whole citizenship. Yet the aristocratic policy 
of the schools — dictated by the professional class 
through university standards — is only now reluc- 
tantly yielding to the pressure of democracy which 
demands a training suitable for the many as 
against a culture limited to the few. Surely the 
higher schools, which have shaped education, have 
excelled the church in avoiding live issues and in 
maintaining a decorous post-mortem interest in 
the life of the people; and yet the whole system 
from top to bottom is now changing and becoming 
socially dynamic. So may it be with the church 
as she faces the situation and becomes less occupied 
with tradition. 

Into the forum movement which is now so 
rapidly developing within the church, many of 
these questions will come for conscientious con- 
sideration, with the result that the facts as set 
forth in Sunday-evening and week-night sessions 
will certainly stir the church to a more vigorous 
attitude on questions of social morality and will 



Adults in the Church School 149 

therefore re-enlist the interest of the pubHc. The 
abnormal fear of creating any issue will give place 
to wholesome partisanship with the right. Not to 
avoid issues, but to be on the right side of issues 
and to clarify them for the popular mind, is the 
essential of moral leadership, and in the forum 
tendency of the present time the church is headed 
toward that goal. 

It is at this point that the function of the church 
needs clear definition. Hers is a composite group 
which by its very nature is incapable of class 
propaganda. The other social groups whose 
component members are firmly knit together by a 
common economic interest must constitute the 
fighting units for their respective reforms. No one 
of these militant groups is altogether right or 
irreproachable in the methods used, and hence the 
church cannot be the agent of any one. Her great 
function consists in her impartial adherence to 
righteousness and in her provision of a composite 
group animated by the ethics of Jesus into which 
these contending efforts may come for frank and 
brotherly consideration. The hope of an honorable 
conciliation which compromises no single item of 
righteousness rests largely with the church if she 
can maintain this open and unfettered attitude 
— an eagerness for the truth, plainly spoken and 
reverently considered, in an atmosphere of broth- 
erly love. 



150 The Chuech School of Citizenship 

This being the case, it is probable that the 
advocates of radical reform will continue to be 
dissatisfied with the church. She will at best 
serve chiefly to conserve the gains made in social 
morality and to sanction certain reforms which 
she cannot directly undertake. The social creed 
of American Protestantism as formulated by the 
Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in 
America is an index of this conserving and sanction- 
ing function. Therein the major humanitarian 
reforms of our time are commended and a publi- 
city bureau for the church conscience is created. 
Through the Anti-Saloon League the church is 
vigorously in the field for temperance reform. 
This must serve as good training and as intro- 
duction to the treatment of other problems which 
result from the same commercialism. For, al- 
though the abolition of the saloon will undoubtedly 
diminish misery and vice, there will remain other 
social causes which the church cannot long over- 
look. Already special days are dedicated to the 
consideration of labor, child welfare, prison reform, 
and the prevention of disease, the method being 
identical with that of the temperance propaganda, 
viz., sanction within the church body and func- 
tion through other agencies. Furthermore the 
Sunday schools are rapidly organizing classes in 
welfare courses, which must lead to civics, and 
which in themselves provide some training in self- 
government. 



Adults in the Church School 151 

No doubt much of the criticism of the church is 
just. Many honestly question the wisdom of 
diverting so much social energy into this channel 
when direct action seems to promise more imme- 
diate benefit. Yet for society to despair of so 
great a dynamic as the religious sanction in the 
hearts of those who would conserve its welfare or 
cure its ills is deliberately to use less than the full 
and normal dynamic for human betterment. 
Church people are awakening slowly because they 
are comfortable. It takes some time to grasp 
what religious living means in this twentieth 
century. Their attention has long been diverted 
elsewhere. When they behold the cause of human 
justice in the present order as something more 
than the concern of mortals, as being, indeed, the 
cause of God, they will respond with that peculiar 
totality of self which inheres in religion. 

The state has consistently recognized this 
potentiality and has uniformly acknowledged the 
religious body as its spiritual partner in social 
control. But on the principle of democracy, the 
church, comprising but a part of the people, is 
answerable in certain respects to the common- 
wealth, composed of all the people. Democracy 
has a moral right to demand reasonable returns 
for the privilege and protection guaranteed the re- 
ligious body. Churches in the United States enjoy 
great liberty in matters of faith and of propa- 
ganda; they are usually tax-exempt, and in many 



152 The Church School of Citizenship 

communities the meetinghouse is protected against 
the near encroachment of competitive amusements, 
such as saloons and theaters. The value of the 
church in conserving morals and public order is 
thus recognized. Her ritual in solemnizing mar- 
riage and burial, in identifying the best mores with 
the will of God, her frequent challenge to better 
living, and her distribution of helps, spiritual and 
material, constitute an aid to government; while 
her training of the young in the knowledge and 
attitudes of religion is explicitly part of her public 
task. 

Such service is not calculable in severe statistical 
form and seldom rises to conscious appreciation 
in the public mind. But it is noteworthy that 
few people will choose to live in a churchless com- 
munity. Perhaps if the thinking of today were 
less mechanistic and not so shortly tethered to the 
ego-economic stake, there might also be a larger 
appreciation of the value to public welfare in the 
church's perennial ministry to the deepest emo- 
tional needs of the citizen, and in her bold but 
imperfect attempt to give to life some unifying 
philosophy and some meaning commensurate with 
the souPs demand. The nation forgets that need; 
industry ignores it; but the church, even when 
captured by nationalism and drugged by indus- 
trialism, still pleads the everlasting rights of 
the individual soul. The nation says ''might," the 



Adults in the Church School 153 

industry ^'wealth/' and the church ^^love." The 
pursuit of unmitigated self-interest on the part 
of men and nations is certainly that ^^ broad road 
that leadeth to destruction; and many be they 
that go in thereat/' It may seem fantastic and 
conceited, but, in the main, the church tries to 
save society from chaos by interposing steadily the 
basal principle of Jewish and Christian ethics — 
the doctrine of brotherly love. She is champion 
of the community of good-will, knit together by 
spiritual bonds and dedicated to the realization 
of the normal family relationship throughout the 
world. 

Granting, then, that as an agency of social 
control and human welfare the church holds in 
fact some such place as is indicated by the govern- 
mental attitude toward her, the question remains 
as to what assurance the government, or all the 
people, may demand of the church that she is 
adequately performing those functions for which 
she holds the people's tacit or explicit franchise. 
To put it more concretely: if, from the viewpoint 
of democracy, the church is a public utihty col- 
lecting large sums of money and aiming to render 
services from which the state deliberately refrains, 
has the state the right to demand anything by way 
of the standardization or efficiency of those services 
and to expect a wise and reasonable use of the 
money solicited from the citizens ? In other words, 



154 The Church School of Citizenship 

is the state bound to see to it that the agency of 
reHgion gives the community a just return for value 
received ? 

One point of approach to such a consideration 
is the important matter of the qualifications of 
the professional ministrant of religion. In the 
professions of law and medicine the duty of the 
^ate to protect its citizens by requiring a certain 
minimum standard of training for practitioners is 
generally accepted as sound and reasonable public 
policy. In fact, the state is no longer negative in 
this task. For, in addition to restricting the 
personal liberty of incompetent would-be prac- 
titioners, she undertakes increasingly to provide 
that the health service needful to the community 
be furnished by the medical profession. Medicine 
is rapidly passing from a private concern, living 
upon the fees of unfortunate patients, to a social 
service of vast sweep and fine morale. Pure-food 
legislation is but the application of the same 
principle to less professional concerns. 

Reasons for the greater laxity in setting mini- 
mum educational standards for accredited special- 
ists in the care of individual souls and in the shaping 
of social morality must be found either in the 
nature of religion itself, as bearing no necessary 
relation to intellectual training and scientific fact, 
or in the practical impossibility of defining what 
constitutes religious leadership. Undoubtedly the 



Adults in the Church School 155 

present method of leaving ordination requirements 
wholly to the sect or to the local congregation, 
whatever it may accomplish in the mobility, local 
color, and numerical strength of the ministry, 
leaves the people at large without sufficient 
guaranty of the educational fitness of ordained 
preachers. 

Just why social control remains incoherent at 
this point is rather difficult to discover. The 
general opinion seems to be that any tampering 
with ^^ liberty of soul" would result in more harm 
than good. The principle involved, even if abused, 
is too sacred to be sharply challenged. It may 
also be that the accepted laissez faire in religious 
competition finds foundation in the common belief 
in ^'revelation" as a past, fixed, and ended achieve- 
ment. If the body of religious truth has been 
given, inerrant and endued with a divine right 
per se, and is so recorded that all may read, then 
the qualification of the religious leader is a matter 
of biblical rather than of social training. He is 
answerable, not to the world of facts, but to the 
God of '^revelation." 

The right of the government to prevent wasteful 
duplication of public and semipublic service in the 
interest of all the people is by no means clearly 
defined; and, for example, while a dozen milk 
wagons rattle back and forth over a route that 
might be served by one delivery, and a common 



156 The Church School of Citizenship 

commodity necessary to every family and already 
subject to municipal inspection is carried about 
by silly competition at great cost to the consuming 
public, it would be premature to expect a much 
more rational method among the vendors of a 
commodity so optional and variable as church re- 
ligion. 

Yet it is possible to forecast a time when public 
opinion, which is becoming increasingly sensitive 
to the inutihty and costliness of a ministry over- 
crowded by those who are unfit and therefore 
obstructive to united community effort for good, 
will demand, perhaps by law, a more adequate 
education for the professional religious leader. 
Such insistence upon a minimum, although not 
uniform, education for the professional who lives 
by religion would not necessarily violate the prin- 
ciple of religious liberty for the individual. It 
would only enforce the fact that the assumption 
of a social task as a life-calling must not be the 
presumption of ignorance or weak sentimentality, 
but the rational service of an enlightened and 
trained mind. 

A pubKc policy of this sort requiring a minimum 
of general education equivalent to a Bachelor's 
degree would bear upon the church's discharge of 
her just functions as a public institution in yet 
another way. For the professional specialties still 
reserved to the denominational theological semi- 



Adults in the Church School 157 

nary would be saved from narrowness by the 
preceding liberal education, since the college man, 
grounded in empirical and historical method and 
awakened by the social sciences, swings from 
sectarianism to community interest, from competi- 
tion with variant believers to a campaign for 
moral objectives. The man who in motive and 
character is fit to enter the ministry would by 
virtue of such training seek to align and unify the 
religious forces of a parish so as best to serve the 
community life. 

It seems highly imperative in the present state 
of American democracy that the bonds which 
make for coherence and unity be greatly strength- 
ened and that some cause more compelling than 
the residuary nationalism of the immigrant or 
its revival in the native-born be brought to the 
fore. Socialism has served somewhat in this 
capacity, but it is quite possible that a serious 
acceptance of the Christian teaching of human 
brotherhood and the application of the family ideal 
to the entire community of men and nations is 
the only solution for class and race divisiveness. 
Something more commanding and idealistic than 
the appeal to party and national symbols is 
necessary in order that the citizen may rise from 
impulsive response to secondary motives to moral 
response to an end so exalted as to carry the value 
of religion. The salvation of a democracy which 



is8 The Church School of Citizenship 

shall cherish the well-being of all mankind as it 
does that of its own citizens rests with religion. 

Despite the fact that religious organizations are 
often, wittingly or unwittingly, recruited to un- 
christian national ambition, the fact remains that 
for both internal and international brotherhood the 
world depends chiefly upon the religious prophet 
and the exercise of Christlike altruism. Practically 
the only international strands holding in the war- 
rent world of today are those of the Red Cross and 
of the equally valiant service of the Young Men's 
Christian Association with the armies and in the 
prison camps of Europe. These testify that the 
so-called moratorium of Christianity is by no 
means complete. 

Now, whether one looks out upon this vast field 
or confines his attention to the most ordinary 
community, he is forced to the conclusion that the 
hope of survival of any human society worthy of 
the name rests with this doctrine of love. The 
machinery of government, even when carried to 
the highest point of efficiency, will not guarantee 
that human beings will live together as befits man. 
The spirit infusing the process determines success 
or failure. The kind of living itself is the real 
reward. In the last analysis the achievement of 
democracy is not measured in things, but in fulness 
of life; and when fair discount has been made, 
does not the church, taken as a whole, stand for 



Adults in the Church School 159 

that abundant life which the founder of Christianity 
proclaimed as his mission to the world ? 

It is therefore, perhaps, a tribute to an idealism, 
like unto her own at its best, that democracy 
fosters the church, believing that in an organization 
whose selective principle is the teaching of Jesus 
there is the greatest likelihood that the highest 
life-values attainable in any society will be demon- 
strated. Hence the church carries a certain self- 
imposed obligation as being a proving-ground 
for the finest possibilities of human association. 
Within the biblical concept of the church, as in its 
sacred status defined by theologians, there is this 
rich and positive consciousness, explaining and 
mitigating somewhat a separateness which has at 
times seemed aloof and non-social to the outsider. 

Turning to the distinctly educational task of 
the church we find that the attempt to domineer 
knowledge so that scientific findings shall be in line 
with tradition is obsolescent. But there emerges 
from the futile and broken defenses of the church 
in this quarter a more glorious and positive task. 
It is not enough that opposition give way to con- 
cession. Concession must become indorsement and 
eager support. In order most largely to serve 
mankind the church must stand for unfettered 
research. Only by so doing may she hope to 
command for human service the findings of the 
most patient and accurate scholarship. Her 



i6o The Church School or Citizenship 

religious education is not an attempt to keep 
knowledge in line with tradition, but rather to 
enforce her imperative of brotherly love in every 
application of the growing power of knowledge 
freely pursued. All processes of knowledge are 
unfettered, but every finding is, by her philosophy 
of life, dedicated to human service. Thus she 
makes education religious by hallowing its objec- 
tive. Inventions and discoveries are for the 
realization of her ideal of a perfect society. The 
unsocial conception of personal profit from superior 
or advanced knowledge is transmuted into a 
proportionate obligation to benefit mankind. To 
Christianize the use of knowledge and that other 
form of power, wealth, would mean almost a 
complete realization of the highest conceivable 
democracy. No agency in society today is held 
more clearly responsible for the effective presenta- 
tion of this ideal than is the Christian church. 

In religious education of the more technical 
sort a mutual obligation to get together rests upon 
church and state alike ; the state being responsible, 
in its school system, for the granting of time and 
opportunity for religious training and the church 
being responsible for the organization and use of 
such time and opportunity. The deadlock occa- 
sioned by sectarianism and resulting in the 
exclusion of formal religion from public education 
must be broken by a more sensible view of team 



Adults in the Church School i6i 

work and a right division of labor. Provisions 
whereby various rehgious bodies may undertake 
the religious nurture of their children in periods 
designated by the school authorities seem to be 
meeting with favor and success. The church is 
under obligation to use these growing opportunities 
efficiently and to warrant democracy's gradual 
recognition, in the public-school system, of the fact 
that the moral life grounded in religion is no mean 
asset to the state. The utter silence of the public 
school, implying the non-existence or negligibility 
of the religious interest, may yet be corrected in 
this way, with proper respect and great gain to 
all concerned. The raw materialism and bald 
self-interest, couched in the specious garb of 
^^ efficiency,'' may yet learn a great deal from this 
co-operation of the most distinctly altruistic and 
soul-respecting group in our midst. Until the 
state is prepared heartily to recognize this fact and 
to welcome such co-operation, she cannot justly 
criticize the church for failing to make her full 
contribution toward righteous citizenship. 

Another function which democracy expects of 
the church is that of bridging the gulf between the 
law-abiding and the criminal classes. The church 
is the chief exponent of forgiveness and moral 
reform for the individual. Her religion is one of 
hope for those who have fallen into vice and crime. 
The bonds of fatalism and the crushing judgment 



i62 The Church School or Citizenship 

of society which enthrall and depress the offender 
have never paralyzed her practical faith in the 
moral resources of the individual and the power of 
recovery which may be found in divine help. The 
actual results of rescue work constitute evidence 
which no fair mind can wholly reject. Quite apart 
from difference of opinion as to any transcendental 
element involved, it is true that the message and 
ministry of religion have served to reconstruct 
many a broken life and, in an emotion running 
deeper than the grooves of evil habit, to weld the 
broken parts into new and masterful personality. 
No other set of people competes for this particular 
work. 

However, something needs to be added to the 
more spectacular and occasional transformations 
thus wrought. The pitfalls and injustice resulting 
in crime must be removed, and the vengeance 
theory with which society blinds itself to these 
must give place to humane and reformatory 
effort. Here, as in the case of the public schools, 
the church has been too much left out of the reckon- 
ing. Possibly she has not pressed forward as an 
eager partner of the state in the understanding and 
treatment of the criminal. Her representatives 
have not been close enough to court and jail and 
prison to imdertake a fair share of the diflScult task 
of saving the culprit to his better self and to society. 
The complexity of the machinery, the vast pro- 



Adults in the Church School 163 

portions of crime in our great cities, and the 
fragmentary nature of Protestant effort have made 
the reHgious counselor too often an absentee in the 
case of men and famiHes passing through the 
dreadful ordeal of broken law. 

Not only so, but in all probationary methods 
whereby the offender, young or old, is being coached 
back into ways of integrity and social behavior, 
there is almost no co-operation between church 
and state. If pains were taken to connect the 
paroled prisoner or the reformatory graduate with 
the pastor of his persuasion in the locality to which 
he goes, much might be done to make this experi- 
ment in faith more largely successful. So also in 
the genesis of crime, and more particularly in the 
first outcroppings of juvenile delinquency, it would 
be a considerable asset if police and probation 
officers and judges would refer these cases at once 
to the local pastor representing the religious affili- 
ation of the person or family concerned. The 
church could add her support to the best efforts of 
the state. It is interesting and pertinent to know 
that almost no family considers itself isolated from 
every religious group. The strands of connection 
may be tenuous or chiefly imaginary but the court 
records show an almost constant claim of relation- 
ship to some religious fold. If ever the church has 
opportunity to render superb service it is at this 
very time when the family is face to face with the 



164 The Church School of Citizenship 

probable humiliation and loss of one of its members; 
and because it can render distinctive help not 
offered by any other agency in this crisis it should 
be an acknowledged and welcome partner of the 
state. 

Such partnership reaches out into many fields, 
including among others the drunkard, the profli- 
gate, and the erring woman. The hope of the 
state to cure by legal barriers alone those crimes 
which are grounded in appetite, passion, and lust 
is heavily discounted by experience. While some 
improvement of conditions will result from strict 
laws vigilantly enforced, the recovery of an inner 
control which wills and does what is right depends 
most frequently upon the dynamic which religion 
supplies. Furthermore, the establishment of a 
public opinion favorable to social recovery rests 
upon the successful promulgation of the doctrine 
of brotherly love, which opens an upward way for 
the unfortunate and erring. Remove this religious 
temper from society, and the offender, whose 
experience at the hands of the law usually creates 
or confirms his antisocial grudge, will be but an 
animal in a cage; or, if he gets loose, his main joy 
will be in retaliation against a merciless social order. 
The church, rightly understood and actually 
functioning in this setting, is a door of hope which 
society greatly needs and should more generously 
use. The emotionalism of the appeal that has 



Adults in the Church School 165 

proved effective with the flagrantly unsocial should 
not bhnd very proper persons to the fact that 
revolution is not a drawing-room nicety. One 
should reflect also that the dearth of legitimate 
emotion is so constant in our mechanistic society, 
that nickel shows, ball games, and theatrical bom- 
bast are thronged by those who seek some sort of 
reaction to testify that they are alive. The church 
may legitimately use for moral ends and society's 
good some of the water that is splashing over the 
artificial dam. She may save many citizens from 
the horrible sense of life's inutihty and give another 
chance to those who might only be a nuisance to 
themselves and a plague upon society. 

The health interest of the people also offers 
opportunity for the church to assist in public 
service. The fact that church congregations are 
in aggregate and regularity of attendance and in 
average ability unsurpassed by any other meetings 
in the community indicates an opportunity to 
serve the state by the presentation of such subjects 
as public health, hygiene, sanitation, and health 
insurance. The proportion of the gospel devoted 
to this interest is remarkable, and the church is 
in true alignment with her mission when she acts 
as partner with the state in the spread of life- 
saving information. Hence, through pulpit, class 
instruction, and exhibit, the publicity side of health 
propaganda may be aided, while the financial 



i66 The Church School of Citizenship 

support given to volunteer agencies that anticipate 
and lead public effort in combating sickness is no 
small part of the church's service. So also in the 
full or partial support of visiting nurses, church 
hospitals, orphanages, homes for the aged, etc., 
the church is rendering, in all, a very considerable 
aid to the state, and ideally, at least, infuses such 
service with a spirit of personal concern that tends 
to disappear from state agencies when they become 
perfunctory or fall a prey to spoils politics. Any- 
how, in addition to the prosaic warmth of the iron 
radiator, these recipients of public care, being 
human, need the cheer of love's fire on the open 
hearth. Democracy expects such service to radi- 
ate from the church and is disappointed only 
when religion is content with her philanthropic 
ministry to the ills flowing from social imperfection 
and injustice and fails to attack the underlying 
economic causes. 

Also in the matter of providing wholesome 
opportunity for sociability the church does much 
and is expected to do more. The popularity of the 
saloon and the public dance hall indicates, among 
other things, a shortage of suitable provision for 
social exchange. The physical equipment of the 
church to relieve this pressure and to direct it 
into happy experience often surpasses her willing- 
ness to undertake the task. Certain negative or 
anemic views of life, together w^ith some fear of 



Adults in the Church School 167 

becoming ^^ worldly/' impede a vigorous social 
policy. Hence youth's quest for social romance is 
needlessly exploited by greed and often debased in 
the process. Furthermore, a vast number of the 
more timid, including adults, will go along with 
almost no group experience outside the family, 
unless the church provides outlet, inducement, 
and direction. It is no small benefit to the common 
life to have this process of socialization and neigh- 
borliness fostered by the church. The forced 
isolation of city dwellers not only induces social 
irresponsibility, which means poor citizenship, but 
precipitates many into wrongdoing which would 
have been impossible under the friendly surveil- 
lance of local acquaintance and neighborliness. 
Taken all in all, there is probably no social agency 
that is doing more than the church in contributing 
to this defensive friendliness, which in turn is 
a necessary ingredient in good citizenship. The 
democratic experience of the mass and other forms 
of public worship, augumented by a generous 
program of sociability, means a large contribution 
to public welfare. 

In times past ecclesiastical architecture has 
adorned the state. The church holds a conviction 
that goodness and beauty are destined to coincide. 
Her doctrine of grace, conception of heaven, music, 
painting, and architecture testify to this conviction 
and for the most part enrich the cultural wealth 



i68 Tbde CmmcH School of Citizenship 

of the state. That the aesthetic may be overdone 
and hence call for crude reactions to discover 
human values has been indicated above. How- 
ever, when aesthetics does not divert righteousness 
to the land of the lotus it is innocent, and when it 
gives fairer fighting form to a just cause it is 
d>iiainic. WTiatever adornment it has given the 
state in times when democracy's present problems 
were not conscious issues, it now happens that 
nothing but a full humanization of aesthetics will 
satisfy popular judgment. The house of the Lord 
should be decent; so should the homes of the poor. 
Beautiful lives and equality of opportunity to 
realize them takes precedence over beautiful 
buildings, boulevards, and what not, whenever the 
two conflict. An equitable distribution of wealth 
gives some promise of the beautiful hfe; an inequi- 
table distribution has too often been the foundation 
of an aesthetics veering toward luxurj' and sug- 
gesting privilege. The church must discriminate. 
She is dedicated to beauty of hfe and in this is 
of one spirit with democracy. Beauty of things 
engages her attention only as means to this end; 
and, whQ^ poverty-, disease, and other imsubdued 
vandals profane and wreck the himian temple, 
la\'ishness is fori>idden in her less holy enter- 
prise. The sanctity of human x-alues comes first 
and is the sole condition of sanctifjong all other 
means. 



Adults in the Church School 169 

This brings us around to the ever-recurring fact 
that nothing can take the place of righteousness. 
No service to the state can compare with the 
outspoken demand for justice. Let this fail, and 
the very palHatives of religion may help betray 
democracy. The ^^Get right with God!" gospel 
taken alone leads to self-deception or hypocrisy. 
How can anyone know conditions at the unseen 
end of that relationship? ^^Do right by man!'' 
That is as old as Micah. ^^ Treat him as thyself!'' 
It is very ancient. On this empirical basis one 
both needs and dares to reach out after the Infinite. 
As the church demands justice at whatever cost to 
business and the established ^^ system/' she will 
contribute her largest, and no doubt her most 
sacrificial, gift to democracy. 

QUESTIONS, INVESTIGATIONS, EXPERIMENTS 

1. What are the most democratic features of church life ? 

2. What are the least democratic features of church life ? 

3. What practical steps could be taken further to democ- 
ratize the local church ? 

4. Describe in detail your church work for offenders. 

5. Do the same for dependents. 

6. For public health. 

7. For recreation. 

8. For education. 

9. For local improvement. 

10. For social justice in industry, commerce, and finance. 

1 1 . With what private welfare agencies does your church 
co-operate ? How and to what extent in each case ? 



170 The Church School of Citizenship 

12. With what governmental agencies does 3"our church 
co-operate ? How and to what extent in each case ? 

13. To what degree is church federation practiced in your 
community ? 

14. \Miat practical tasks call for further federated effort ? 

15. \Miat public questions have been discussed in the 
regular meetings of the church or in the meetings of its 
auxiHaries during the past six months ? 

16. What is the Forum Movement ? (See Democracy in 
tJie Making, by George W. Coleman. Little, Brown & Co.) 

17. What is the duty of church people with respect to 
poverty ? (See Poverty the CJiallenge to the Churchy by J. S« 
Penman. The Pilgrim Press.) 

18. Wliat pubKc offices are held by members of your 
church ? 

19. What percentage of your enfranchised members 
voted at the last election ? 

20. Has any survey been made of your community? 
If so, what use is being made of it ? (See The Community 
Survey in Relation to Church Efficiency, by Charles E. 
Carroll. The Abingdon Press.) 

2 1 . Work out a civic directory to be posted in the church 
building for the use of church people and to cover the 
following items: ambulances, hospitals, civic bureaus, 
charities, churches, schools, clubs, courts and jails, employ- 
ment bureaus, police, fire, libraries, dependent institutions, 
improvement associations, social settlements, labor unions, 
business men's clubs, newspapers, aldermen, inspectors, 
health officials, playgrounds, etc., as the case may require. 

22. WTiat is the annual budget for religion in your 
community ? 

2 7,. What for education and for recreation ? 

24. Give five reasons for your adherence to democracy. 



Adults in the Church School 171 

25. Write a paper on Old Testament Laws relative to 
land tenure or to the treatment of slaves. (See IsraeVs 
Laws and Legal Precedents, by C. F. Kent. Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons. See also Social Institutions and Ideals of the 
BiblCj by T. G. Soares. Abingdon Press.) 

26. What sayings and deeds of Jesus serve as moral 
dynamic for democracy ? 

27. Make a three months' civic program for a church 
discussion club composed of adults. 

READING RECOMMENDED 

Abbott, Grace. The Immigrant and the Community. 
Cutting, R. F. The Church and Society. 
Hodges and Richert. The Ijistitutional Church. 
Peabody, F. G. The Religious Education of an American 

Citizen. 
Penman, J. S. Poverty the Challenge to the Church. 
Rauschenbusch, W. Christianizing the Social Order. 
Strayer, P. ]M. The Reconstruction of the Church. 
Ward, H. F. Social Creed of the Churches. 
Williams, Charles D. The Christian Ministry and Social 

Problems. 

Note. — The religious leader or teacher will find the 
Survey, 112 East 19th Street, New York City, the best 
weekly periodical on social w^ork. The information which 
it affords on current problems and methods and on the 
literature and agencies of social amehoration is indispensable 
to the church in her community service. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Aesthetics, 43, 137, 167 f. 
Amusement, commercialized, 

93, 114, 166 
Anti-Saloon League, 150 
Arbor Day, 117 
Athletics, 41, 75 ff. 

Bible, a rural book, 107 
Biography, 65, 96. 
Boy Scouts of America, 58 ff. 
Boys, Handbook for, 57 ff- 
Boys' Life, 65 

Camp Fire Girls, 67 ff. 

Cause and effect, 41 f. 

Child: duties, 24; in the coun- 
try, 127 

Children, protection of, 24, 90 

China, 19 

Choosing a vocation, 73 

Christian ethics, 117 

Church: democracy m, 131, 

134 ff., 140, 159, 169; 

grounds, 44; rural, 103 ff. 
Citizenship, elements of good, 

2,3 
Class: distinction, 43, 121, 138, 

145; organized, 55 

Collective living, 38 
Collective sin, 13, 141 
Country church, 103 ff. 
Country minister, 105, 125 
County fair, 117 
Criminal, 161 ff. 



Cromwell, 14 

Cuba, 19 

Current Events Club, 95 

Debate, 86 ff. 

Democracy, 7, 10; in play, 81; 
in the church, 131, 134 ff., 
140, 159, 169; in the home, 
25 

Discipline, 56 

Dow, Neal, 53 

Earl of Shaftesbury, 96 
Elwood, Charles A., quoted, 17 
Ethics, Christian, 117 
Every Boy's Library, 66 

Festivals, national, 24, 76, 117 
"Find Yourself Campaign," 73 
Fire department, study of, 34, 

74 
Fireman, 33 
Flag, 23, 60 
Forum, 148 

Fourth of July, 76, 117 
Franchise service, 99 

Gang, 55 

Gardening, 39 ff. 

God the Creator, 107 f. 

Golden Rule, no 

Good citizenship: elements of, 

2,3- 
Good manners, 29, 30, 46, 59 
Gough, John B., 53 



175 



176 The Church School of Citizenship 



Government, study of, 86, 90, 

Grounds, church, 44 

Halloween, 76, 117 
Handbook for Boys, 57 ff. 
Hay, John, 19 

Health: officer, 33; public, 165 
Home, 25, 28, 66, 113, 116 

Idealism, 72, 114, 159 
Immigrant, 45, 97, 121 f., 137 f. 
Individualism, 16, 27, 108 
Intellectual reconstruction, 85 

Juvenile delinquency, 163 

Kindergarten, 29 
Kindness, 62, 113 
Kingdom of God, 6, 8, 104, 133 

Labor Day, 117 

Landlordism, 108 

Lane, Franklin K., quoted, 2 

Lessons in Commtmity and 

National Life, 54 
Life Questions of High-School 

Boys, 54 
Lincoln, 14, 117 

Majority, attainment of, 96, 99 
Manual training, 42 
May Day, 117 
Memorial Day, 117 
Ministerial training, state regu- 
lation of, 153 ff. 
Mischief, 27 
Mock trial, 91 
Moral order, 42 
Moving pictures, 24, 88, 115 
Music, 92, 118, 136 



Nature worship of children, 44 
Neighborliness, 114, 167 
New Year's Eve, 76, 117 

Obedience, 38, 78, 107, 112 
Old Settlers' Club, 119 
Organized class, 55 
Our America, 92 
Outlook to Nature, 126 

Pageant, 92, 118 

Pathological treatment of civ- 
ics, 18 
Patriotism, 23, 58, 60, 70, 124 

Personal: expense account, 
73 f.; ownership, 27; piety, 
9fE. 

Philanthropy, 8 f., 16, 26, 40, 
143, 166 

Piety, personal, 9 ff. 

Policeman, 31 f., 74 

Politics as vocation, 19 

Postman, ^^ 

Protection of children, 24, 90 

Public: control of activities, 
15; library, 127; schools, 16, 
34 f., 106, 117, 148, 160 f. 

Quarantine, 33 

Race prejudice, 45 

Red Cross, 158 

Reverence, 22 

Roosevelt Commission on 
Country Life, 1 24 

Rural: church, 103 ff.; life, 40, 
103 ff. 

Sacrifice, 37, 72 
St. Patrick's Day, 117 
St. Valentine's Day, 117 
Saloon, 76, 93, 133, 150, 166 



Index 



177 



Scout masters, 66 
Scribner Lesson Series, 53 f . 
Sectarianism, 132, 139, 160 
Self-government, 55 f. 
Self-inventory, 73 
Sentimentalism, 95 
Sermon on the Mount, 112 
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 96 
Sin, collective, 13, 141 
Slumming, 94 
Social service, 95 
Soldierly virtues, 38 
Street, 31, 35 
Summer program, 39 
Sunday-school lessons, 21, 22, 

53 
Survey, community, 93 f., 121 
Symbols, 23 

Taft, William H., quoted, 30 
Taxation, 99 



Temperance, 22 
Tenant, 108 

Thanksgiving Day, 40, 117 
Thrift, 36, 38, 63, 69 

Vitai lampada, quoted, 81 f. 
Vocational interest, 40, 70 f . 
Vote, 96 

War, 37 

Washington, Booker T., 14 
Washington's Birthday, 117 
Waste, 36, 43, 70, 74 
Wind and Weather, 126 
Women's clubs, 114, 147 
World: brotherhood, 125, 158; 
peace, 19 

Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation, 158 
Youth, 14, 53 ff., 144 



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